About the Exhibit
“On Debt Row” is a creative space where painting, photography, performance, and protest converge, bringing together artists, feminists, activists, and communities to explore the unimaginable weight of debt and exploitative debt systems and tell the untold stories of women and their communities in the Global South.
Transforming jargon and statistics into stories and art that connect with the lived experiences of the Global South, the exhibit unveils the power of art and storytelling as a tool for resistance to structural inequalities and injustice.
Ensuing/sewing Worlds, Piercing the Global Veil
THE O HOME
“From austerity measures and structural conditionalities, we must move forward and imagine worlds that rechannel public funds towards universal social protection and ecological care. Despite the recent financial meltdowns, we strive for abundance, fighting to protect what remains for the sake of future generations. The O Home casts a net to reach into this future.
We summon currencies of the land, the ancestors guiding us to its revival, the core of the earth, the sky, dreams of feminist worldbuilding knotted there, closely moving, arriving.”
Beyond the Debt
JUAN PABLO BOHOLAVKSY AND JAIRO ALVAREZ
“What would a world without debt look like visually, or at least a debt system that is not based on the exploitation of the majority of the world’s population?
In this second phase of the project, “Beyond Debt”, we put forward a series of proposals and demands for the reform of the international financial architecture, so that finance is at the service of the people and not vice versa. And we use photographs to show what such a world might look like. Thus, rather than contemplation, art here is deployed as a utopian project.”
Comics for System Change: Storytelling as Resistance
ESCR-NET
“What if art could expose the forces that shape our world—and empower communities to transform it?
Developed by ESCR-Net members with grassroots movements at the forefront, The Power of the 99% to Stop Corporate Capture is a radical comic series that transforms storytelling into a tool for political education and collective resistance. Each multilingual issue reveals how corporate capture operates—how corporations seize control of global decision-making spaces—while amplifying grassroots alternatives rooted in justice, care, and Indigenous knowledge.
In collaboration with comic artist Lucio Zago, ESCR-Net members illustrate how institutions like the IMF and World Bank enforce economic models that serve corporate interests at the expense of human rights, public services, and ecological integrity.”
Who owes who? On unpayable debts and visionary disobediences
Debt for Climate
“Harvesting of the talk with Denise Ferreira da Silva, Paula Chakravartty, Verónica Gago and Lucí Cavallero about the power that the realm of creation and imagination offers for action, repair, and financial disobedience.”
Behind the Exhibit
Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD)
APWLD is the leading network of feminist organisations and individual activists in Asia and the Pacific, with over 260 members representing groups of diverse women from 30 countries and territories in the region. It employs feminist analysis to dissect, engage with, and transform laws, legal practices, and the systems that shape and inform them, fostering feminist movements to influence laws, policies, and practices at the local, national, regional, and international levels.
The O Home
Philippines
The O Home is a mother-child space developed through the synergistic collaboration of founders Yllang Montenegro and Len-Len, launched in August 2023. Their works draw on personal experiences of grief, migration, women’s empowerment, and the challenges faced by becoming a mother artist in the Philippines.
Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky and Jairo Alvarez
Argentina
Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky is a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina at the National University of Río Negro. He served as an independent expert on foreign debt and human rights at the United Nations from 2014 to 2020. Jairo Alvarez is an Argentine photographer and mixed-media artist based in Copenhagen. Together, they explored and imagined, through photographs, what a world free from debt and an exploitative debt system would look like.
International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR-Net)
ESCR-Net is a collaborative initiative that unites 300 social movements, Indigenous Peoples groups, human rights organisations, feminist and environmental organisations, independent unions, and advocates from around the world, working to secure economic, social, and environmental justice through human rights. It has facilitated spaces for members to build solidarity and connect their struggles across regions, tackling deep-rooted challenges that erode human rights and mobilising collective action to transform unjust economic, social, and political structures.
Debt for Climate
Debt for Climate is a global grassroots movement of movements initiated by the Global South from an anti-colonial perspective. They build power from the bottom up by uniting workers, Indigenous and local communities, feminists, and faith-based, environmental, social, and climate justice movements in both the Global North and South to cancel the illegitimate financial debt of the Global South, stop exploitation and extractivism, to enable self-determined, just transitions.