Karen Amanda Moser

Karen Amanda Moser: As we received the request to write a contribution on our partici­pation in the Sommerakademie Paul Klee (SPK) 2025, I wondered under which conditions this would happen and if it is rude to ask for an honorarium. Do I, as a former HKB student, owe the institution to deliver these lines? After all, the state invested in my fellow students and myself. Maybe because currently, in Switzerland, we benefit from the very fragile opinion that arts and culture are a necessary part of society. I like to think of my artistic practice as an activity with an indexical nature, to think within, through and about different con­texts. This is why I am very excited to be part of this programme. While reading your curatorial proposal for the SPK 2025, called Shaping what we owe (one another), a linguistic particularity caught my attention. It is the fact that in English the term “debt” usually means an amount of money or specific services we owe another person, while “guilt” is morally con­notated, describing an unquantified, negatively perceived act of wrongdoing. In German language, both would be trans­lated as “Schuld”. This suggests a proximity between a relation, which as such can be seen as neutral, and a judgement. Maybe you would like to say something about this difference and how one could even understand debt, or owing to the others, as something positive, or from another angle? 

Pauline Hatzigeorgiou: The term “debt” is indeed intricately linked to notions of guilt and fault in its Germanic roots, and to the idea of “duty” in Latin, carrying a strong moral dimension that has been reinforced by capitalist dogma. Interestingly, in its Slavic roots, the term is connected to duration: debt is time. As David Graeber reminds us, the very essence of debt is that it is not meant to be fully repaid. From this angle, we can see the economy of debt – which shapes political structures – as a perversion of debt’s social function (especially in the colonial contexts, in the financialization of public debts, etc.). Graeber references models of human economies based on expansive networks of debts that are continually renewed rather than settled. This calls for a deconstruction of certain myths, especially the liberal myth of exchange (i.e., the idea that each individual is always seeking to maximize their own advantage). At its core, debt is a social contract – an obligation that, like any contract, can and must be renegotiated. Reciprocity is central to this. It’s not so much about viewing debt as a positive concept but recognizing it as a social modality that refutes the transactional logic of the liberal model. 

I hope it is OK for you, to invert the designated roles, that I made myself the interviewer instead of the interviewee. Would you like to introduce the three other artists you’ve invited to join the SPK programme?
This workshop project initially grew out of an idea for an exhibition project. The Sommerakademie offered me the opportunity to imagine a first conceptual framework. 

I thought of Nika Dubrovsky, who is an artist and the wife of the late David Graeber. Nika initiated the Graeber’s Institute dedicated to his work, which actively continues his thinking and struggles. The institute develops projects of archiving and transmission in multiple forms, among which what Nika calls Visual Assemblies – collective protocols for visualizing complex issues. I also considered Georgia Sagri, a Greek artist who was, among other things, involved alongside Graeber in the Occupy movement. Her practice is deeply engaged with theoretical and political reflection. She works primarily through performance, with a strong focus on commitment, healing, and recovery based on one-to-one sessions (through her initiative HYLE in Athens). Finally, there is Niloufar Emamifar, an Iranian artist currently based in New York. Trained as an architect, she engages with broader phenomena of public space and privatization, using structural analysis to investigate legal and spatial frameworks. And, of course, yourself – whom we had the pleasure of welcoming to the project as HKB alumna. Each of these practices is highly singular, yet a shared thread runs through them: the negotiation of contractual space. In this sense, the notion of debt ultimately leads us to the very idea of commitment, and of refusal. 

Another aspect I found very intriguing about your concept is that it dares to connect several levels of the notion of debt. As David Graeber shows, on a global view, debts between nation states are historically grown tools of power as well as late symptoms of colonial violence. Further you suggest looking at debt on a personal level, concerning one’s practice. What methods do you have in mind to investigate these aspects?
It is crucial to challenge the violence and injustice of debt as a mode of governmentality. The issue may not primarily be one of scale but, as you pointed out, of inversion: What does the state owe us? As you rightly observed, institutions are rooted in duration – so what happens when these long-standing obligations are being dismantled, for instance through austerity policies? But it’s also about engaging with conceptual peers. In my approach, I linked the notion of debt with surplus, particularly the surplus of precarious workers – the precariat. In this sense, “debt” can represent work without rights – labour that is unrecognized, without formal contracts or security. This incompleteness serves as both the conceptual engine and an artistic tool, which we will experiment with during the workshop at the HKB. 

Curator Pauline Hatzigeorgiou has invited three guests, Nika Dubrovsky, Niloufar Emamifar and Georgia Sagri, and Bern Academy of the Arts HKB alumna, Karen Amanda Moser, to work on a tightly curated set of questions in Bern from 4 to 8 August 2025. They will develop a Y-Toolbox workshop for HKB students that will take place from 10 to 14 November 2025 in Bern.