a stadtblind and attac collaboration more information

A call for photos by Silke Ötsch
Tax havens and offshore centres are commonly associated with positive images of remote sunny islands. Providers of offshore services like to talk about tax paradises, sunny islands and freedom, where capital is agile (or, as Germans say, as “flighty as a fawn”.) They like to contrastthis with notions of tax hells and obsolete state bureaucracies. We aim to deconstruct this positive imagery and use our exhibition to show tax havens not as island paradises, but as juridical constructs central to the existing economic system and offering special privileges to wealthy people and corporations. We want to show what tax havens really look like: letterboxes, billboards, tiny banks on the German- Austrian border, for example, or big banks sited next to cow sheds. We want to stress that tax havens are not exceptional and exotic, but core elements in the global financial system, so we will focus on tax havens and offshore financial centres in Europe (by Europe, we are talkin geographically, not politically – so places like Switzerland or Jersey are
included.) We aim to interest a broad public, especially those who are interested in politics but who shun tax as an issue because they find it dry and difficult. We also want to attract people with an interest in culture. Many such people are affected by finance. We also hope local groups
will organize the exhibition in their towns – especially, if possible, in tax offices of the tax authorities. We want to degrade the prevailing image of the tax avoidance and evasion service industries and of cooperating elites, by providing a more accurate image of what they
are about. This way, we hope to add to the pressure on politicians to act seriously against tax havens. Each participant can send up to 5 photos, with 300 dpi resolution. Please add a short description ofeach one. Criteria for selection The jury will then evaluate the submissions with the following criteria in mind: 1. Does it show a component of a tax haven or of the offshore
economy? 2. How relevant is it? Does it provide new information? (For
example, a photo of billboards in the Swiss City of Zug is better than using a montain lake with
a flower in front of it. But if it shows a billboard advertising“Nord Stream AG,” whose supervisory board is headed by the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder – so much the
better.) 3. The quality of the photo.
The Jury The jury is composed of: John Christensen (Director, Tax Justice Network International Secretariat, London), Ronen Palan (expert on Offshore Economy, University of Birmingham), Detlev von Larcher (TJN Germany), Silke Oetsch (working group on financial markets
and taxes of Attac Germany), Celia Di Pauli (planning agency “Stadtblind”),
Philipp Schwarz (planning agency “Stadtblind”).
Prizes
First prize: A Panasonic Lumix DMCFS3 Blue Compact Camera
2nd and 3rd prizes: One of these books (the winners can choose): P Ronen Palan, The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires, Cornell
University Press, 2006 P Ernst Schmiederer und Hans Weiss, Asoziale Marktwirtschaft, Köln, 2004
P The catalogue of the exhibition (to come out in spring/summer 2009)
The first prize is kindly funded by John Christensen.
Deadline
The deadline is December 30, 2008.
Send contributions by email to:
silke.oetsch@attac.de, or If it
exceeds 10 Mb please send it by post
to: Silke Ötsch, Schneeburggasse 43,
A-6020 Innsbruck (Austria)

“Sound-Seeker is a map that privileges the ear over the eye. The project reaches across the city’s geographic, economic, educational, cultural and racial divides. It is at once a historical record and a subjective representation of the city. It is what each user wishes it to be and it is ever growing, ever changing and totally interactive.” www.soundseeker.org

Andrea Polli, along with the NYSoundmap project and The New York Society for Acoustic Ecology, created this wonderful collaborative sound map of the city. The project asks users to document sounds throughout NYC and plot them on a map. We’re exploring a similar collaborative approach to sound gathering for the Colors of New York, with a different style of documentary-based mapping. Instead of mapping sounds to specific locations in the city, we’re interested in mapping sounds to a color palette.

“The peculiar sounds of transit are the signature tunes of modern cities. These sounds that remind us the city is a sort of machine. The diesel stammer of London taxis, the wheeze of its buses. The clatter of the Melbourne tram. The two-stroke sputter of Rome. The note that sounds as the doors shut on the Paris metro, and the flick, flick, flick of the handles. The many sirens of different cities.”

Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings

Mass transit’s sound landscape travels alongside passengers as a constant companion, familiar and steadfast, often whittled down by the senses to a comforting hum. A familiar commute becomes background, marked by the sound of stops. The ping of doors opening and closing denotes stops on a map, alerting passengers to the passage through space within the city.

Each time I travel to a new city, I record the sounds of public transportation. These sonic landscapes are as unique to the city as its architecture, pavement and accents. The smooth rubber wheels of Mexico City’s subway alert passengers to the arrival and departure differently than the elevated clang of Chicago’s El Metro. After these recording ventures, I travel home to New York City and ride the subway listening on headphones to the sound of other city’s trains. Traveling in cities outside one’s own brings about a heightened state of awareness. My aim was to experience this state of consciousness at home.

While playing the sound map of Mexico DF over the existing sounds of the subway in New York, I found that I braced myself when the wheels in my headphones alerted me to an upcoming stop, even if the real subway was between locations. I became less aware of my position within the city, yet more aware of my surroundings within the car.

At the 2006 Conflux festival in New York City, I experimented with the idea of using headphones to enhance the attentiveness of passengers to the sounds produced by daily travel.

I decided to time the subway stops from many of the mass transit systems around the world to stops along the G-train in NYC. With this global sound map of mass transit overlaying an existing system, it’s possible to examine how much one relies on sense of hearing to know his or her location on a map. How does the journey from point A to B change if the normal ding of the door opening and the announcement ““Einsteigen bitte. Zurückbleiben bitte.” is replaced with, “Stand clear of the closing door please?”

Please test “Subtrak” in your own city!