Beyond Debt
Curatorial Note
by Jairo Alvarez and Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky
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?
We took up this question thinking about the debates that will take place at the IV International Conference on Financing for Development of the United Nations, which is to be held between June and July 2025 in Seville, Spain. This conference will discuss and decide whether, who, to what extent and how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be financed; at some point, the international financial architecture [for the remainder of the years to achieve Agenda 2030, and beyond] will be debated.
Phase 1 of this photographic project was produced and published in 2024, and was entitled “Debt and its world”. These photos already brought together social sciences, politics and aesthetics in their narrative. This epistemic fusion allows art to transgress its conventional limits, as it is both permeated by and reflects an increasingly “difficult and complex” world, where finance plays a central role as a determinant of our lives. Thus, these photos function as devices that produce meaning, that activate both critical and poetic modes of thinking (Olivera 2019). It is that, for each age its [own] art (Gustav Klimt dixit).
In addition, the use of photos enables the ideas behind them to circumvent the anti-intellectualism of our current era (Huret 2025), deploying the visual to reach a wider audience than a strictly academic one. The photos, with their curatorial notes, are released on the Internet [and are accessible free of charge] as well as published in academic formats (books and scientific journals, in English and Spanish). to the idea is for them to circulate [freely].
The photos from Phase 1 were essentially graphic denunciations: they exposed and unmasked how debt – both public and private – together with the orthodox economic policies often implemented to ensure debt repayment, adversely affect a wide range of human rights and groups in situations of social vulnerability.
In this second phase of the project, entitled “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.
For works of art to be truly utopian, they must offer two related, if contradictory, elements: a genuine aspiration for a better world, and the recognition that such a world could exist only in our imagination. However, both elements are always in. dialogue: failure in utopian attempts fuels the desire to repair what is broken and build something new (Noble 2009), thus pushing for social and political action for change. It is in this reciprocal search that the human rights movement anchors its strategy in the face of social injustices and the economic system based on speculation and financial concentration: “In the meantime, the illusion appears, as the brightest face of utopia. They attack it, overshadow it, give it a pejorative twist. They say: ‘Naïve are those who try to change the world, because everything that appears outside capitalism is illusory’. They are wrong. Illusion is play, and it escapes nihilism, because the playful territory has its own reality” (Labrune 2023). Eduardo Galeano (1993) also made this point: I go two steps, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking.”
Evidently there is something utopian in this project. There are multiple demands that are raised and expressed in this collection of photos entitled “Beyond Debt”. One of these demands is the reduction (relief) of the debt of the Global South countries, so that the fiscal space of the debtor States can be used to ensure the realization of the rights, especially economic and social rights, of the population, and the development of the country. There is also a demand for the determination of interest rates that are neither usurious nor abusive, which do not subjugate and exploit the debtors; in short, that the cost of the debt be reduced. In this utopia, the IMF and the World Bank are focusing their efforts not on the repayment of credits at all costs, but on reducing the levels of poverty and inequality in the countries. The prices of goods and services are directly related to human rights (food, housing, education, health, water, etc.), which should not be subject to financial speculation; they are first and foremost rights, not commodities. Finance here supports green economies (e.g., the expansion of renewable energies), and not finance fossil and other extractive industries. Loans are agreed in local currency, not in foreign currencies (Dollar, Euro, Yuan, Pound Sterling), to reduce the external vulnerability of debtor countries. There are heterodox economic alternatives to austerity, which sacrifices life on the altar of short-term fiscal discipline. Financial activity is regulated; unregulated finance tends to extreme concentration of wealth, abuse of power, State capture and inequality. Imposition of high tax rates on large financial investors redistribute profits derived from financial speculation. Debt sustainability is assessed from a perspective that includes human rights and life; debt cannot be considered sustainable if its payment implies the violation of the human rights (education, health, food, housing, etc.) of the debtor population. Science and education are valued over the financialization of all aspects of life. The countries of the Global South have greater participation (number of votes) in the assemblies of the IMF and World Bank at the time of voting. Greater transparency of loans and their contracting conditions are ensured. In case of a climatic event (flood, drought, hurricane, fire, earthquake, etc.) in debtor countries, debt repayment is automatically suspended and debt reduction is carried out. Feminist economics carries more weight than a narrowly monetarist approach.
If for such socio-economic transformations to occur, it is necessary to have recreated them in our imaginations through artistic expression, we can then reinsert these ‘impossible’ aspirations into our reality in order to destabilise an asphyxiating, disenchanted and numb vision of the world. We make photographs of the impossible so that it becomes possible. Art not only as a personal salve but also as a collective salvation.
Bibliography
Galeano, Eduardo (1993), Las palabras andantes, Catálogos SRL, Buenos Aires.
Huret, Romain (2025), “La fin des sciences sociales? Tradition et modernité de l’anti-intellectualisme aux États-Unis”, Revista Esprit, No. 1-2, at https://esprit.presse.fr/article/romain-huret/la-fin-des-sciences-sociales-45710
Labrune, Noemí (2023), “Elogio de la utopia”, in VV.AA , Noemí Labrune y la lucha por los derechos humanos. De lo individual a lo colectivo, Ed. de la Universidad Nacional del Comahue.
Noble, Richard (2009), Utopias, MIT Press, Massachusetts.
Olivera, Elena (2019), La cuestión del arte en el siglo XXI. Nuevas perspectivas teóricas, Ediciones Paidós.
Jairo Alvarez and Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky
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.