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Risk is a body of work that uses two moments of crisis for Citigroup - the engineering crisis at Citicorp Center in 1979 and the financial crisis of 2007 - as a platform for exploring the public and private representations of a company’s business and practices, the pervasive fallacy of perpetually positive financial returns, and the scale of influence that banks’ behaviors and philosophies occupy in our individual and collective lives using the images of two of the banks iconic buildings as a vehicle.
In Inherent and Residual Risk, a voiceover narrates these two crises in parallel, compressing them into a single space and throwing the moments of synergy and difference into stark relief. The video is comprised of a street level image of each building which is manipulated by an outsized hand, and both image and narrative lose stability. Who is acting upon the buildings, and for what purpose, is an open and unanswered question. The images of these buildings, and their attending narratives, become both the malleable material of public relations and iconic structural marvels, incredibly sturdy and impossibly flimsy at the same time. |
