Tracing the effects of financialisation and austerity, the collaborative project The Broken Pitcher by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou and Peter Eramian attends to a concrete case: A crucial meeting at a bank, negotiating the foreclosure of a family home in Larnaca, Cyprus in 2019. Foreclosures are one of the austerity measures that were imposed on the Cypriot government by the Troika (the EU Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) after the financial crisis in 2012.
The Broken Pitcher looks at the banking system and the potentials for changing the script of interacting with it. The project consists of a one-to-one scale model of the bank room, that functions both as an exhibition space as well as a set which features in a 70 min film that reconstructs the scene. Inspired by Abbas Kiarostami’s film First Case – Second Case (1979, Iran), the reenactment of the bank meeting 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?”. The filmed responses encompass perspectives of people from different interest groups in Cyprus and beyond, including housing rights activists in Barcelona, Berlin and Beirut, persons who are similarly affected by these policies, public figures, lawyers, economists and artists.
