Friday Tour | Charlotte Rommerskirchen

Charlotte Rommerskirchen is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching focus on the politics of debt, as well as the global political economy more broadly. The tour is guided by the motto ‘debt is a time machine’ and foregrounds different perspectives on debt – public, private and ecological – across time. If debt is a time machine, it is not only money that travels through it: debt continually carries forward the power relationships and inequalities of the past. We will start with Sammy Baloji’s work Untitled and discuss debt as a tool of exploitation in the context of both colonial rule and our post-colonial world through the lens of the ‘odious debt’ framework. With Moyra Davey’s work we will discuss private debt. The series Copperheads invites us to consider the use and value of money, which takes us from the early twentieth century when the Lincoln Cent was first minted to the current cost of living crisis. Finally, with Hanna von Goeler’s series Migration, we will consider ecological debt discussing the changing face of money and its impact on our ecosystems as we are entering a new era not only with the end of ‘cheap money’ but also the end of ‘cheap nature’.