#11 We hereby demand

The business of finance deals in fiction. It presents the compelling story of how it makes money out of money, value out of thin air. It tells us that invisible hands, free markets, and floating signifiers operate detached, not only from the rest of economy, but from the material and social reality. This narrative of pure abstraction is perpetually reproduced in culture in everything from reflective glass structures, The Big Short (2015), Billions (2016), and Wall Street (1987), to finance bro’s on #FinTok. It is fast, it is slick, it is future. The fiction of finance is thin air.

Yet, while it might be abstract, financial thin air is everywhere. We breathe it, we drink it, we inhabit it. It shapes the streets we walk, the cities we share; as well as the cities we don’t share, the streets we don’t share; the seats, the straits, the spaces we don’t share; space we enclose, extract, and eliminate. “Respiration is a refeeding of what is abstract into what is so tangible it changes our form, at least slightly,” (The Undying, 2019) poet Anne Boyer writes. Finance capitalism’s pervasive fusion of abstraction and materiality constitutes a performative power and a representational problem.

Esch-zur-Alzette appears as a local alloy of financialized abstraction and materiality; of representations and lived experience; of future and past; or, perhaps more accurately, of thin air and cold steel. A former mining city, which established its value in the extraction of iron ore from the ground underneath it today facing skyrocketing square meter prices accelerated by the financial enterprise of the state of Luxembourg. A city that has cast the ivory towers of knowledge production into a steel plant. A city in which vacated brownfield sites covered in bags and bags of asbestos are projected to become the green neighborhoods of the future.

“Do not veer of the foot path if you walk in the forest”, I was told, “the abandoned mine galleries can collapse.” In many ways Esch-zur-Alzette appears to have developed around the discrepancy of what you see and what lies below, behind, beyond. This legacy is as prosperous as problematic, though often not to the same people. And then it simply shapes home to many, work to even more.

Such discrepancies, however, rehearse the representational problem of finance. Urban development tends to project an image of the surface. A smooth, sustainable abstraction in soft light and with blooming trees. At the same time, the questions of social materiality are left unanswered below: Who was here before? Where are they now? Who is intended to live here, to study here, to work here? Why? Who must build this? On what terms? What is the politico-economic infrastructure: Who decides? Who pays? Who owns? Who benefits from it now, later? How does it affect life across the city? The sway of representational abstraction makes urban development appear as inevitable as inaccessible. It makes you think: “I can’t really relate and I can’t affect it anyway, so why even bother?” The financialized surfaces of urban development have banked up social materiality, lived democracy.

Picking up the open-ended practice of Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary (2024) we insist: When financial abstraction becomes so tangible it changes the world(s) around us, changes our form(s), we need to change the forms with which we approach, understand, and navigate, too. When politico-economic fictions bank up local experience, we need to unbank it. When some paths become dangerous to tread, we need to tell each other about them and keep telling each other about them.

Therefore, we hereby demand The Unbank of Esch. An independent organization, communal archive, local laboratory with the purpose of gathering, curating, and giving access to lived knowledges of the city; unofficial experience, embodied memory, research, interpretation, concern, strategy. An imaginative and interpretive infrastructure that not only rewrites official financial fictions of urban development, but gives form to an op-ended and polyphonic story of Esch in its own right, providing its inhabitants with strategic forms to see, feel, share, navigate, and shape their city.