Global Finance Walk - Offshore Tour Operator

The “Offshore Tour Operator” is a psycho-geographic GPS that guides the walk of the user through the database of the Panama Papers, in search of the physical traces of the offshore banking within the city landscape. The workshop starts with a theoretical introduction by Laura Calbet. Drawing connections between the housing financialization of the newly constructed residential property on Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum and global investment funds, Laura Calbet exposes private equity investments, development funds and corporate networks that finalize construction projects on the ground by guaranteeing each other's loans. Equipped with the Offshore Tour Operator, participants are then sent on a hunt for shell companies, trust firms, domiciliation agencies, shadow finance offices and agents that are referenced in the Offshore Leaks, Panama Papers and Bahamas Leaks databases. The notes and photographs taken during these expeditions will be reviewed and analyzed in a joint debriefing at the end of the workshop.



RYBN & Laura Calbet

Laura Calbet As part of her PhD thesis on "Speculative Urban Production. New Housing Construction in Inner-City Berlin" at the TU Berlin, Laura Calbet has undertaken a longterm research project on the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum. Since 2020 she is Professor of Theories and Methods of Urban Planning at the University of Stuttgart. She studied urban and regional planning at the TU Berlin and was a research assistant at the TU Berlin and at the Leibniz Institute for Spatial Social Research in Erkner. She was a visiting professor at the BTU Cottbus and a substitute professor at the TU Dortmund. Laura Calbet lives in Berlin.

RYBN is a extra-disciplinary artistic research platform created in 1999 and based in Paris, France. RYBN.ORG leads investigations within the realms of high-frequency economics and information technologies, writing kabbalistic algorithms, inserting suicidal trading machines into the financial markets, perverting neural networks during their training phase or hunting ghosts in the noise of data traffic.
rybn.org