Trading Zones

(2018 – 2026)

In 2018 I went to live in a tax haven.

This became the starting point for Trading Zones, a long-term examination of the relationship between the ‘on’ and ‘off’ shore financial systems. While these are often presented as binary opposites, one transparent and regulated, the other shadowy and illicit, they are in fact highly integrated and interdependent structures. To put it another way they are two sides of the same coin.

In Trading Zones this on-offshore relationship is crystalised in the connections between the City of London, a medieval vestige turned financial centre in the heart of the Greater London, and the Bailiwick of Jersey, a semi-autonomous crown dependency turned financial centre in the English Channel. I explore the offshore through the two jurisdiction’s entwined histories, institutions, cultures and practices, exploring how these very distinctive areas of high capitalism have evolved, by design and by accident, over the course of nearly a thousand years.

The resulting project combines a wide range of materials including photographs of key people, spaces and events in the history of the on-offshore financial systems, alongside extensive texts, archival documents, interviews, diagrams and visualisations. Through these elements Trading Zones aims to move beyond the clichés of financial power, seeking instead to present a portrait as intricate, entangled, and ambiguous as these systems themselves.

Trading Zones comprises:

= 500 digital photographs and composite photographs
= 88 diagrams of financial instruments, structures, agreements and organisations
= 7 essays amounting to 80,000 words total length
= Approximately 300 A4 pages of research materials
= Various items of ephemera related to finance
= Ebb Tide, 20 minute two screen video installation
= 700 page book dummy

Hire the travelling exhibition (coming soon)

View the Trading Zones photobook