Finance & Ruination

A one-day symposium on critical finance, collapse and speculative futurity.

This symposium explores the entanglements of critical finance, speculation, and collapse as temporal and ontological conditions of the present. Finance operates not only as an economic system but as a medium of subjectivity and an engine of futurity, producing new forms of value, risk, and governance. Yet financial speculation also embodies dynamics where collapse is not an exception but a mode of operation: a constitutive feature rather than a catastrophic aberration.

Through two thematic panels and a keynote, the symposium brings together scholars working across media theory, anthropology, philosophy, and critical art practice to critically investigate how financial systems fabricate futures while simultaneously accelerating their dissolution. The symposium reframes collapse not as an event but as an internal condition of finance - an integral immanence within the financial mediation of time, and a fundamental component of contemporary political imaginaries and technocapitalist exits.

Schedule
14:30 – 16:00 Living & Dying under Financial Capitalism: panel with Giulia Dal Maso, Gerald Nestler, Naoki Matsuyama
16:15 – 17:45 Exits &Speculative Capital: panel with Wassim Alsindi, Erik Bordeleau, Mikkel Rørbo
18:00 – 19:00 Currency of Nihilism: keynote by Amin Samman

The event is hosted by the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures and organised by Naoki Matsuyama and Mikkel Rørbo.