Cassie Thornton: Wednesday, June 3rd, 11:30-1:00 pm in Lecture Hall 1

Cassie Thornton is also known as the Feminist Economics Department (The FED). The FED works with imaginary financial limitations. On earth, we have amassed excessive public, private and personal debt, justifying an inability to provide shelter or food, education, or healthcare for many, and much less, go to space. Collective fear of debt is so strong that when we look at the sky we see the debt ceiling where the ozone used to be, rather than an expansive universe with infinite possibility. Thus, The FED’s materials are in themselves financial forms– debt and its accomplice, security.

On earth, The FED constructs situations where members of the public observe and confront financialization– in order to see it as an idea that can be manipulated rather than the absolute way of living and being. Through producing experimental moments in public spaces, participants test and extend what can be considered ‘real’. This work involves ordinary people doing extraordinary things— dancers touching the surfaces inside financial institutions, actors selling their nervous breakdowns to pay off debt, security guards protecting public vulnerability by reciting poetry written on the job, and people screaming their debt to space over the radio.