beyond debt - jairo alvarez

Beyond Debt (2025)

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?

This photographic series puts forward a set of proposals and demands for the reform of the international financial architecture, imagining a world where finance serves the people - not the other way around. We envision how such a world might appear. We represent it. Thus, rather than contemplation, art here is deployed as a utopian project. 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 in order to make it possible.

This series was preceded by “Eyeing the debt”, which functioned as a graphic denunciation: exposing 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.

This collaborative project is the result of the work of Jairo Alvarez, photographer and mixed media artist based in Copenhagen, and Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky, researcher at the Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and National University of Rio Negro. Their combined effort explores the intersection between finance, art, and human rights.