Robin Hood Asset Management Cooperative

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- a counter investment cooperative of the precariat. Our business is minor asset management [1]

URL = http://www.robinhoodcoop.org/


Description

"How is it done? Very simply. By understanding that knowledge (immaterial and affective elements, the ability to learn, think, create and relate to the presence of others) has became a means of production. By understanding how these elements are producing value. By understanding how it is organized. By understanding the functioning of the new mechanisms of valorization at work in semiocapitalism. By understanding the mimetic logic of financial economy. By understanding the formation of market sentiment and how it organizes the multitude of transactions at the financial market. By knowing how the public opinion “runs” the formation of value.

Some basics about the financial market: The information deficit (or, call it 'information overload') is structural for the functioning of the stock market.

Nobody, including the big investment institutions, knows exactly what to do.

That is why making money at the stock market is not about being "right", about having the "right" opinion, but about the art of knowing the common sentiment, the public opinion, and of anticipating, and even manipulating its movements. This is what Robin Hood does.

We are operating a massive dynamic virtual agent – we call it “the parasite” – that is able to analyze transactions from all major US Stock Exchanges including NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX, etc. It operates a little bit like an internet search engine (like Google): it examines all information for a particular financial market segment and identifies critical patterns and relations in this information. What is the relationship between this transaction and this transaction, that transaction and that transaction, what is the regularity of their connection...


To put it very simply:

We know everything what and when people are buying and selling.

And then we rank them, these buyers and sellers, all of them, revealing the consistent winners and losers for a given instrument. The statistics are quite surprising. They are not just any statistics, but a dynamic technique which is able to transform bare beliefs and desires (to buy/sell) and their intensities and tendencies into anticipatory timelines: by piecing together the regularities of innumerable singular events which are conscious and unconscious, in continuous movement, productive and non-productive, individual and collective and totally uncontrollable by any traditional means, we are able to see an emergence of a form.

In short: we identify who is able to make money consistently with a particular instrument. We then follow when the majority of the best players of each particular instrument start buying or selling. On these basis, we then rank each instrument according to a prediction of its future behavior: it is good and prospective when the majority of the best operators (who have consistently been right about its movements) start going for it, it is bad when they start rejecting it. We identify the most competent actors for each instrument and manage our portfolio according to their movements. In other words, we operate in the pure space of imitation, pure space of mimesis. We let the bankers play the contents, we play the position.

Because, as Michel Serres writes:

- “The one who plays the position will always beat the one who plays the contents. The latter is simple and naive; the former is complex and mediatized… To play the position… is to dominate the relation. It is to have a relation only with the relation itself… that is the meaning of the prefix para- in the word parasite: it is on the side, next to, shifted; it is not on the thing, but on its relation. It has relations, as they say, and makes a system of them.”

Like Serres’ parasites we hook to the brains of the financial elite at Wall Street, the community of these men who are making millions... we know exactly what they do and when… and they don’t even know it. We expropriate the knowledge and capabilities of financial capital and its representatives and put them to work for us – just like capital normally puts to work our abilities and knowledge for its own increase. This is minor asset management. Another way to occupy Wall Street.

We have run massive tests 2003-2009 and 2009-2011 and now the operation is running. Our operating costs are ridiculously minimal compared to traditional asset management with high end locations and leather sofas. Now, we would like to build a channel to socialize or out-onomize this information, to use it, to play with it, to study it, to exploit it... but also to build on its basis a possibility of micro investing for basic income, for radical project funding, of cheap loans for financing one's studies or life, in a form of an investment cooperative. We call it minor asset management, a possibility of political operation of building from our minor assets financial out-onomy in cooperation." (http://www.rhmam.org/pages/how-does-it-work)


How it works

"We are not an investment fund, let alone an hedge fund in the classical sense. We are a cooperative of investors. Each investor is a member of the cooperative and buys a one time membership fee of 30 euro. This membership represents the one vote each member has in the yearly member meeting of the cooperative, no matter how many shares are bought. One member One vote. A member is obliged to buy at least one share. This first share is called the obligatory share. So the minimum investment is 60 euros. Each member can buy as many voluntary shares as she or he wants.

BUYING the shares goes through the green BUY SHARES button or when you have already invested the BUY MORE SHARES button. When you click this button several fields appear. One that asks the amount of shares, another that asks you to choose one of six options about how you want to divide your net profit (profit minus costs*) between yourself and Robin Hood Projects (RHP) (the grants and such). If you choose to keep more than 50% of the profit, a one-time commission is taken. This money goes directly to the Robin Hood Fund and the remaining amount is invested for you. This Robin Hood Fund (RHF) invests in the Cooperative and generates profit or loss and the profit goes 100% into Robin Hood Projects.

One time per month, at the beginning of each month your money is invested in a new Serie. The value of each serie is different and depends on the Net Asset Value on the moment the money is sent to our Broker in New York, Interactive Brokers. From that moment on it starts on a daily base to gain or to lose. Gain or loss depends on two major indicators 1. the value fluctuations of the stocks and 2. the value fluctuations in the euro/dollar conversion rates. BUT note: Nothing is guaranteed: past performance is not indicative of future results!" (http://robinhoodcoop.org/)


Interview

DEMOCRATIZING THE POWER OF FINANCE

A Discussion about Robin Hood Asset Management Cooperative with Akseli Virtanen


  • Pekka Piironen: What is Robin Hood?

Akseli Virtanen: Robin Hood is an asset management cooperative we established in June 2012. It is a counter-investment bank of the precariat, which is rethinking means of finance and financial services. We are bending the financialization of economy into our benefit.


  • Pekka: How do you do it?

Akseli: We operate a massive dynamic data mining algorithm – we call it the “Parasite” – which logs into the brains of the bankers at Wall Street and they don’t even know it. We know exactly what they do and when. We know who can make money consistently with certain instruments. Robin Hood is our means to share this knowledge. In the first year, the value of our portfolio rose 30,74%. With this result were the third best hedge fund in the world. Now, after the second year, we are up 40,15%.

Pekka: Some time ago the biggest Nordic newspaper headlined “Robin Hood robs from the financial elite. Asset management for those without assets. Robin Hood received marching orders from Aalto University and annoyed the art audience at Kassel Documenta. Is the mysterious Robin Hood Co-op an investment club, art or philosophy? Akseli, how does that sound?


  • Akseli: I think that asset management for those without assets is quite a good headline. We talk about minor asset management. It is our business.

“Minor” is a concept which comes from Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s conceptual toolbox. They took it from Kafka's diaries, where he was talking about authors within major language who where nevertheless able to make it transform into something else... their own… by making it crumble and stammer, by operating in the tissues and edges, from within, by the same language but turning it into something else. It is an attempt to think about political means, means of change, where there is no outside. Minor is something that always brings together personal and political. It is always about making our existential territories more habitable. And it is always something collectively produced. It changes power relations by changing the conditions of situation. It works for "a people to come" by opening new routes and processes of becoming.

So, minor asset management is a very special way of managing assets - a way that makes something new possible when it looks like nothing new is possible. A becoming. This is our invention. But it is also management of the assets of minorities, in the Kafka’s sense, who will and can never become major, but will always remain like a spit in the salad. And it is management of minor assets, small assets, this is our other particularity. A lot of small assets working together. We don’t mind the connotation of being under age… not legally responsible, a minor, in a process of still becoming... neither as an attribute to our way of managing assets or to the assets managed, there is something true there too.

“Marching orders” from Aalto University is perhaps not quite accurate, because we were not courting in any way, but in the middle of a normal establishment of a start-up or a spin-off company – which was, by the way, what they were hoping from the Future Art Base from the beginning. Aalto Arts is badly disadvantaged here in comparison to the Schools of Business and Technology in the University. What was frustrating in these “marching orders” was that the university management didn’t really care to find out what this project was about, they just fired us because Robin Hood was thought to be potentially dangerous to the reputation of the university. That was their exact wording. The decision was a preemptive solution and it was never explained or justified for us in an way. This is how arbitrary power works, it tries to organize and control the possibility of our action and thought.

“Investment club” is also an exciting choice of words, I don’t exactly know what it means. We are a normal Finnish company operating under the Finnish law. The form of the company is a cooperative. And we are in the middle of establishing the Robin Hood America in Silicon Valley.

Philosophy, that we certainly are – especially in so far as we can think that the task of philosophy is to create new concepts – but politics might have been more understandable in terms of our context, starting points and aims. Is Robin Hood business, art of politics? This is an interesting starting point for any discussion.


  • Pekka: And why the name Robin Hood?

Akseli: Everybody knows what Robin Hood does. In the age of semiotic inflation and information overload, we don’t want to spend too much time explaining. You know, you need to get it in a different way.

The roots of Robin Hood are in the British Forest Law which allowed Norman kings to add more and more common forest areas under their ownership. Villages, houses, fields and even churches were destroyed to add new land to king’s forests. Inhabitants of those areas were thrown away without food, resources, opportunities and prospects. They had very limited options of survival, some submitted, some became informers, conmen, traitors and other form of opportunists, the local officers were corrupted providing their services to those who could pay. And the punishments were severe: Robin Hood got his death penalty for poaching king’s deer in Sherwood.


  • Pekka: In a sense not that different from the situation today?

Akseli: Now, six hundred years later we see new “Forest Laws” being enforced everywhere and the common is again under threat. Again we need the financial services of Robin Hood, our methods are just a little different due to the changed circumstances: now we follow all transactions at the US stock exchanges, make databanks of market actors, deconstruct them from individuals into dividuals, to extract their most knowledge and capabilities and put them to work for us. But the consequences are the same: The Sheriffs of Nottingham are again clueless when they can’t anymore withhold King’s deers or guard the routes of the wealth expropriated from the people. Robin Hood’s business is minor asset management. It means sharing and democratizing the power of finance.


  • Pekka: You have talked about Robin Hood as a parasite of financial economy and providing access to money which is not tied to the necessity to work?

Akseli: There are two points here: First, parasite is a concept by Michel Serres. What is important here is what it tells of the relationship we have with the financial market and its players. We let them do all the work and just imitate them. Why? Because, as Serres writes, the one who plays the position will always beat the one who does the content. The latter is simple and naïve, the former complex and intelligent. By playing the position we dominate the relationship. It means that we have a relationship with the relationship itself. It is the meaning of the prefix “para” in the word parasite: to be on the side, not on the thing, but on the relationship. Parasite has relationships, it makes a system out of them.

Secondly, there is today an asymmetrical division between those who are able to create money by transforming it into financial capital (to earn money as separate income without a necessity to work) and those whose only access to money is to work, possibly at any cost and condition – or first take debt, and then work. And furthermore, these two forms of money, the money you get for doing work (money as means of payment, money as means of exchange), and money as capital, have very different powers. Or more precisely, the former has no power, it is money castrated of any power, while the latter has a power to command future. It represents nothing, it has no equivalent, except in future exploitation of labor, nature and society.

Robin Hood is developed as a strategic means to challenge this debt mechanism of control and of limiting our future. We offer also this other group of people a possibility of income which is not tied to the necessity to work. An access to money as capital. It is a very concrete opening of the field of possible. It is an element of independence. That is why we can talk about democratization of finance. Or of profanation of finance: of taking something sacred, which we are not allowed to touch or which only the priests can touch and understand – just think about the economy, the financial market and its priests today – and returning it to common use and play.


  • Pekka: Robin Hood has been described as a “freak in the world of banking” established by a group of professors in economics and the arts in the Aalto University?

Akseli: This is true, even if the professors were maybe not the majority in this group. The founding members of the cooperative were: Tero Nauha, Karolina Kucia, Liisa Välikangas, Heidi Fast, Kari Yli-Annala, Jan Ritsema, Sakari Virkki, Teemu Mäki, Ana Fradique, Lauri Kananoja, Valentina Desideri, Pekka Piironen and Akseli Virtanen. There were years of preparation and building of momentum before this. At the moment there are in the board me, Jan, Tere Vaden and Tiziana Terranova, we have over three hundred members from fifteen different countries and are about to move to the next level of the operation.


  • Pekka: You have talked about Robin Hood also as a hedge fund of the precariat?

Akseli: Our aim is to bend the financialization of economy to the benefit of those who have this far been paying its costs: workers at the mercy of the precarization of work, suffering from the insecurization of labor market and social rights, growing indebtness, of decreasing price of labor and of downsizing of the welfare state. That states quite clearly the relationship of our starting points. Disinflation is the monetary relationship of the financialization of economy and precarization of work. We see this now very clearly in Europe. How is it possible for these deficits to exist without any inflation? Because the logic has changed, the logic of derivatives has provided a means to manufacture liquidity which does not devalue the base currency. That is why at the moment our collective capacity to assume debt and pay taxes and be the direct bearer of austerity measures – for governments downsize for one simple reason, to be able to borrow more – creates direct vehicles for financial capital accumulation (which are not investments in expanding production). The increasing supply of government bonds (safe means for capital preservation) is possible only through deficit cuts and excluding all inflationary spending. This is like the financial equivalent of raw material for industrial production, like Robert Meister has so well said. In financial economy the surplus is extracted more directly from this capacity than from the stagnating number of people employed to goods and services production. Today the growth in the forms of indebtedness is the condition for capital accumulation, just like expansion of labor force participation was for expanding commodity production.

In this situation, Robin Hood operates exactly like the hedge funds, and not like a "retail fund" of a bank. Robin Hood owns stock in other companies as the only asset, and operates with greater flexibility than banks. The investments of members are open ended and withdrawals are allowed only at certain moments of the fiscal year. The value is calculated as a share of the net asset value (NAV), which means that the increases and decreases in the value of cooperative's investment assets and expenses are directly reflected in the amount a member can later withdraw. This is exactly what hedge funds do too, but what Robin Hood hedges, is precarity - it take’s a position in the financial market to offset and balance risk adopted by assuming a position at a contrary market, the precarious labor market, where so far people have just been paying the bills of financialization by letting it use our capability to assume debt and pay taxes as the main raw material for accumulation of financial assets. Robin Hood’s asset management is based on the idea at the origin of the derivative market: it is possible to produce new assets by means of hedging existing ones. Finance is essentially a technology to create spreads (through creation of doubts, uncertainty, volatility, constant threat of illiquidity) that are valued and can be arbitraged. Robin Hood is using in quite a smart way the same new capitalist financial alchemy of turning uncertainty into rent.


  • Pekka: By this you mean the Parasite algorithm, which takes advantage of the spreads and volatilities of the stock markets?

Akseli: Yes, exactly, from the beginning we said that we are utilizing the inefficiency of the financial market and our understanding of how public opinion, or market sentiment, organizes the multitude of actors at the market. We do big data. The Parasite, which Sakari has designed and developed, follows all the transactions at the US stock markets, identifies the spreads, the best actors, follows their swarming – and then imitates the emerging consensus action of the best players. Quite simply, the assets of the cooperative are invested at the market by following and imitating the emerging consensus action, or swarming, of the world’s best investors.

The hypothesis of the efficient market is by the way one of the most important truths of the current economic policies. Our operation is based on a completely different understanding on how the market works and what are the mechanisms of creating economic value today, for example the role of flock behavior, origin of imitation and means of controlling a swarm in this.


  • Pekka: So you are following a computer program?

Akseli: I think it is funny, when the Parasite and Robin Hood are interpreted like this. We are dealing here with a little bit more “a computer program”… For example the whole Polemos book series we did in early 2000 with Tutkijaliitto was created for building this understanding and organization. There are wonderful books, 14 altogether, published in this series, from the best economic and political thinkers at the moment. For example Christian Marazzi’s Language and Capital, Maurizio Lazzarato’s Revolutions of Capitalism, Paolo Virno’s Grammar of Multitude, Franco Berardi’s Info-Labour and Precarious States of Mind, Bracha Ettinger’s Co-Poiesis, Félix Guattari’s Chaosmosis and Three Ecologies, also my book Critique of Biopolitical Economy and the famous Dictionary of New Work which was based on a long lecture series we organized at the School of Economics. It is important to understand that the parasite coded by Sakari is the essential part of the operation, but what is really important is the approach behind it, that is, the understanding of the changed nature of creation of value. I don’t know how I could emphasize this more. It sounds so funny, when somebody just says that here are these dudes investing based on a program – I mean after all the research and intellectual investment, years of theoretical and experimental work we have put into this. And there is the massive empirical testing of the Parasite carried out over six years 2003-2009 at the US stock markets, and even more importantly, Sakari’s research work on the algorithm and product development with the Parasite has been actually going on for more than 20 years. Robin Hood has not just dropped from the heaven.


...


  • Pekka: And there was an international audience: artists, activists, philosophers, professors? I saw the images of the Stuttgart office and it was full of diagrams and words like aesthetics of algorithmic production, growth, dividual, exhaustion of possible, machinic surplus value, commonfare, parresia, and that some radical philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari were dropped in the stream of the discussion?

Akseli: We are researchers of economy and organization. We knew already in the mid 1990’s that this will not become a picnic when we started using thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and then the Italian post-operaist writers to study and understand economy better instead of the main stream economic and business theory. Yet, without caring too much about the consequences, we continued with our work because we knew that we are right – that this was the right way if we wanted to really understand how economy and its organization works today. So with these thinkers we were able to understand, for example, how signs and meanings are part of real production and not only some kind ideology or superstructure of production, how the use of language can have real effects; and how the dynamic of the production of value is in the organization of a heterogeneity, of heterogeneous forces, and not only in the relationship between capital and labor; and how it is possible to control not only actual but potential action and thought. With them we also understood the blurring of the boundaries between economy and politics and how the paradoxes of immaterial production – for example, that relations weight and immaterial matters – cause problems to old approaches and distinctions, and that we need new concepts and methods if we want to understand what is going on. And that some of the key issues of the production value in economy today – like how to create a public, get its attention and keep and modulate it – have already been thought quite precisely in classical philosophy, rhetorics and dramaturgy, in semiotics and linguistic theory etc.

Through this work we have now perhaps invented something significant: a new understanding of the creation of value at the financial market and a mechanism of distributing this knowledge, which we call Robin Hood and minor asset management


  • Pekka: Robin Hood is connected to the ideas on basic income, is Robin Hood trying to overturn capitalism through the stock exchange?

Akseli: Yes, the arguments for basic income are in fact quite similar. Our methods are just thought a little bit further. But “overturning” belongs to the political means of the last century and not those of Robin Hood. What is important for understanding Robin Hood, is to understand why the old political means of building independent life do not work anymore and why we need to invent new means. By the way, one very good analysis about this is your book “Economy of Insecurity”.


  • Pekka: You say that Robin Hood is a paradox, a monster, an experiment in creating a new social form and that it irritates people?

Akseli: Yes, I would say that we are an experiment in creating a new social form. “Paradox”, “concept” and “monster” are attempts to articulate this new form. Robin Hood is about creation of these new forms of which I talked about before. Paradox reveals the limits of our current understanding. Monster instead is something unpleasant, disgusting and a-natural, where there are together elements which do not “normally” belong together like art, economy and politics.

So Robin Hood looks like a financial operation, but in a strange way. It creates a foreign language inside the automatism of financial control, it is a parasite which exceeds the established meanings of finance, makes them stutter and mutate. It releases minor finance from major finance, it turns major assets into minor assets. It is minor asset management. And it is also an attempt of reactivating the body of general intellect. Not in the old political way, but in a paradoxical way. In a monstrous way. In an insolvent way. In a disgusting way. Robin Hood sounds like a ponzi scheme, a fake, or it could be a private group of aggressive entrepreneurs ready to take advantage of the naïve cultural people. It could be a hoax, a scam, or just an “art project”. It is unallowable, impossible and disgusting… a monster... But what is important is that it corresponds to our subjectivity.


  • Pekka: The value of the Robin Hood portfolio rose 30,75 percent in the first year. And after the second year now, it is up 40,15%. It means that Robin Hood beats almost all of the funds operating on the US stock market in the world. Is Robin Hood business, art, or a bold philosophical experiment? It fits all of those contexts.

Akseli: That is quite beautifully put. I would add that Robin Hood is also an economic experiment. I would like to emphasize this, the economic side of Robin Hood, because it is from here that the so called “economic experts” are trying to dismiss us. This is what the priests repeat: you philosophers and artists and temporary workers, you have no access here, to the temple, you don’t understand, you cannot come here, you cannot touch this, you must let us deal with this. The funniest thing of course is, that Robin Hood has been able to create something that this clergy will not understand. This is also our best protection.


  • Pekka: Does it mean that Robin Hood is trying to beat the enemy by joining with it?

Akseli: We don’t in fact join the financial capital, we use it and appropriate it, like a parasite – unless you can think that a parasite joins its host. We are trying to find a way forward from the financialization of economy. There is no return from there, our money is already there. There are no financial virgins. As soon as your money hits your account, the banks start to use it for expanding credit. And more importantly, our individual and collective capability to assume debt and pay taxes is the main raw material for accumulation of financial assets at the moment. The size of the derivative market has in the past 30 years grown to become over 20 times bigger than entire world Gross National Product. And at the same time the number of banks has decreased by 40%. Only nine big investment banks actually control almost the entire derivative market. This has nothing to do with free competition or “may be best win”. During the first 3 months of 2013 alone, I repeat, the first 3 months alone, the net earnings of Goldman Sachs was over 2,26 billion dollars (Q1 in 2014 2,02B$), HSBC 6,35 billion dollars (Q1 in 2014 5,1B$), JP Morgan 6,53 billion dollars (Q1 in 2014 5,3B$)…. It is quite a lucrative business. And our money, for example the retirement money, is already there too. We just never see the profits. We just carry the risks. Our individual and collective capability to assume debt and pay taxes is used directly for making these profits.

Bending the financialization of economy into the advantage of precarious workers. Transforming the private profits into shared resources. Creating a relation with money which works as a means of freedom, escape, and increase of independence. Profanating finance, returning its space to common use and play. Appropriating the power of money as capital. This is our business.

And our strategy is ingenious. Like Serres’ parasites we hook to the brains of the financial elite at Wall Street, and they don’t even know it. We appropriate the most important knowledge and capabilities of financial capital and its representatives and put them to work for us – just like capital normally puts to work our abilities and knowledge for the increase of its own value. This is minor asset management. Another way to occupy Wall Street." (http://robinhoodcoop.org/pages/democratization-of-finance-an-interview)



Discussion

Our ethics, values and mission

Letter from the Chairman of the Board, Akseli Virtanen:

"Even if looking like a purely financial operation, Robin Hood is about organization. About emergence of a new form. It is about experimenting and inventing a becoming, when it seems impossible. For this the financial-tactical level of Robin Hood, no matter how well we have elaborated it, is maybe not enough. Robin Hood must also become sensible.


What does this mean?


It means that when you look at Robin Hood a little bit closer, it certainly looks like a financial operation, but somehow in a strange way. It seems to create a foreign language inside the techno-linguistic automatism of financial market, it is explicitly a parasite which hollows production of value from the inside. It escapes and exceeds the established meanings and identities of financial economy, makes them stutter and mutate. It releases minor finance from major finance, it turns major assets into minor assets. It is minor asset management. Which corresponds to our subjectivity.

Robin Hood is a project taking place in the midst of the marvels of financial economy and crises of Europe, when the precariousness of immaterial labour defines our every day, semiocapitalism exercises its arbitrary power and forces us to continuously exploit ourselves and our friends while cynicism, depression and detachment form others have become important means of our survival. There is no heroism in the exhaustion and disillusionment we are experiencing. We have difficulties in believing what is happening to us, because nothing seems to happen. We are tired of being ourselves because the self-evidendies of our lives don’t work anymore. We know they don’t, even if we still try to pretend that they do. We need a reinvention of ourselves, but have no strength or appeal for it. That is why we all sound like déjà vu. The realm of possible at our disposal is exhausted.

This is the starting point of Robin Hood. The closed reality of European crisis and semiocapitalism, the predisposed framing of the field of possible: the exhaustion of possible at our disposal, social life becoming swarm, the consequent morphostatis, loss of our singular ways of becoming. It seems that there is no way out.

How do you invent a way out, when there is no way out? How does something new begin when nothing new can begin? Robin Hood is a real experiment in this.

Robin Hood is an attempt of reactivating the body of general intellect. Not in the old political way of the last century, but in a strange way. In an insolvent way. In a monstrous or paradoxical way (but are you not taking part in the same system?!). In a disgusting way (what are the ethics of this?!). In a rebel way, maybe, but in any case in a way that is not reducible to present frameworks of knowledge and predictability (this is politics? art? is this research? or business?).

Robin Hood sounds like a ponzi scheme, a fake, or it could be a private group of aggressive entrepreneurs ready to take advantage of anybody. To become a member demands certainly something we don’t have, like belief in the possible, or imagination. This could all be a hoax or an “art project”. Robin Hood makes us uneasy, it breaks the “natural” and “easy” flow of independent action and ready environments. It is something unallowable and unimaginable, almost impossible… a monster... with its specters of mistrusts, weaknesses, confusions, fears, impossibilities, non-commitments and insolvencies… something which is closer to poetics than exchange of information and rational communication.

This poetical-financial monster, which is not reducible to present frameworks of knowledge and predictability and breaks the “natural” and “easy” flow of independent action and ready environments, with its specter of mistrust, disbelief, weakness, fear, impossibility and insolvency, is something around which we appeared also in Kassel Documenta in September 2012. On the one hand it was a straight forward cold blooded “pitch event” to raise more capital and exploit the Documenta structure – like the meanest motherfuckers of precariat would absolutely do. On the other hand, the “pitch” played in a way that was insolvent, included presence of a risk of excess and deception, a semiotic insolvency, a paradoxical, poetic, non-sensical ambiguity of the project, which has not yet become communication, for which you don’t yet have the words… but which makes you “feel it”, which makes it “touch you”, and forces the demonstrative gesture: “here”.

Could the depressing present, lack of hope, lack of possible, dead end of autonomy, be also a breeding ground for a new kind of monster, a parasite, that is self-aware, self ironical and has only its precarious present to share, and to lose.

We think it can." (http://www.rhmam.org/pages/our-ethics-values-and-mission)

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