The Broken Pitcher

The collaborative project The Broken Pitcher traces the effects of financialisation and austerity by looking at the banking system and the potentials for changing the script of interacting with it. Starting in 2020, gatherings and workshops have been at the core of its making, in order to rehearse structures and formats of working together, scripting, and researching the context of foreclosures in relation to debt and coloniality, to counter the isolation and desperation they produce. To this end, the project has foregrounded the practice of collectivity.

As it moves across localities in and out of Europe, at de Appel the project takes a multi-fold formation: a one-to-one scale model of a bank room that functions both as an exhibition space and a film set; a feature-length film (The Broken Pitcher, 2022) that reconstructs a bank meeting of a family negotiating their imminent home foreclosure; artistic annotations of the project’s research and afterlives and a publishing assemblage.

The film The Broken Pitcher, released in spring 2022, is inspired by Abbas Kiarostami’s First Case – Second Case (1979) and reenacts an ‘unscripted’ bank meeting. The scene is then shown to people from various backgrounds, who are asked to respond to the question: “In your opinion, what should the bank employees do?” During this iteration in Amsterdam, the film set is reactivated through roundtable conversations on topics of ownership, displacement and cooperative housing with local interlocutors.

The film set becomes a portal to speculation, taking form as a collective artwork, along with an installation of an accompanying body of work by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, Peter Eramian, Raissa Angeli, Stelios Kallinikou, Orestis Lazouras, Faysal Mroueh, Nayia Savva, Maria Toumazou and Emiddio Vasquez. A set of recorded video interviews and research material across various contexts will be on view. The project will host a series of public programmes, including film screenings, forums, and workshops, connected to land (and housing) struggles and histories.