lawil: This is the third episode of the Future Money podcast and
we're in conversation with Xiaoxiao.
You might know her as Xiaoxi Song.
She is an artist, writer, and researcher currently residing in Berlin, Germany.
Hollis: In her practice, she focuses on community centric experiences with
mediums that range from poetry and text.
and game design to theater and live performance.
In this
lawil: episode, Xiao Xiao shares what inspired her to follow a creative pathway.
Her art became a tool of political expression, which led her to focus
on themes close to her heart, such as migration and financial exclusion.
Xiaoji: Welcome.
Hollis: Thank you.
Xiao Qi, thank you so much for joining us on the Future Money Podcast.
I'd love to hear more about your origin story.
Like, Where you're from originally, what first inspired you to a path of artistry,
as you've been saying, like the themes that guide your work or migration, um,
techno politics, like these are meaty theoretical topics that you've chosen
to pursue through the medium of art.
So I'm curious, like how you arrived to understanding that intersection of.
Geopolitical phenomena within your artistic practice.
Xiaoji: Yeah, thanks for the question.
I think it's actually super relevant also for the work that I am currently working
on commission by Interledger Foundation.
I grew up in Wuhan, China.
It's now, let's say, famous city globally, but I also want to talk
about it's not just famous for the reason that everyone knows, but
it's also the punk city of China.
I grew up with.
hearing revolutionary stories in my history.
I grew up at, let's say, a societal fabric that is quite different than
right now, uh, where civil society is still quite active and alive.
And I was always interested in using art as a tool for political expression,
as a tool for movement building.
And it was sort of like also the only way.
For people like me to kind of participate in politics and to express
my political views and to also start dialogues with people of marginalized
communities and with people of different groups and different communities.
I came from a family of migration.
That's also why that.
Um, migration has been such a central topic of my work, my
artistic practices as well.
My grandma was born and grew up in Indonesia.
She went to China when she was 14, 15, when she was just a teenager by boat
with Her other sisters and brothers and many of them, it was a different time.
It was a different time with we imagine and we see border differently when
institutions are different, when migration was seen as differently and the Chinese
diaspora at that generation, they went to China to build a new country
and then cultural revolution happens.
So that's another story.
Um, so I think for me, that is in some way, There were like this talk
about like intergenerational trauma, but I've recently learned this term
intergenerational knowledge system is by comparing my grandma's migration
experiences and my own experiences of like shifting identity from an international
student to a migrant and also by just Being in Germany, a democratic society,
when it was 2015 and 2016, when there was also like a lot of like changes
in migration in society, this informed my points of view and informed my
understanding about migration integration as a topic, and that makes it such a
relevant and important topic for me, both personally and when it comes to my career.
What kind of society that I want to live in.
Technopolitics, also growing up in accelerating Chinese society, where
techno solutionism is sort of like the only way to go when we grow up.
I was deeply influenced by feminist science and technology
studies during my undergrads.
That also is one of the major topics that I'm exploring because of, let's say,
yeah, it's also quite a personal reason.
So I'm actually
lawil: quite curious, especially when you mentioned the punk background of Wuhan.
How did that influence, in combination with the techno
politics, your own artistic practice?
Xiaoji: That's really, like, exactly what I would like to talk about.
So I grew up in a street that, uh, basically is considered, I don't
know how's that called in English, but we call it like backstreet
of a school or like a university.
So it's like the street that is very close to a university campus where all the
students hang out, have drinks, and like do different like, you know, organizing.
small readings, organized community events.
And I grew up in the back street of the local art school.
And that's where I went to elementary school, middle school, high school.
And that is also a street of the start of the graffiti culture in my hometown.
It's also the street with, uh, like the punk scene is not all
there, but there were like small in Chinese, we call actually in
East Asia, we call it live houses.
It's like kind of like a music revenue for, um, small like independent
concert to have his industry.
When I grow up, I see a lot of like urban contestation.
There were a lot of people trying to do graffiti.
Our school student trying to organize screening films and music.
This is like a sense of rebellion.
The sense of like.
self organization, direct actions, and like taking care
of each other in the community.
It's also the street that not only with all different subcultures,
but also one of, let's say, the most poor area of the old Wuhan.
I think it reminds me a lot of like Schiller kids in Berlin.
I don't grow up with galleries.
Galleries is like a new gallery.
New thing for me, but I grow up with street art and I grow
up with small music revenue.
I grow up with different tiny readings and screens and people campaigning
in the street So I think that spirit is still inside me and that's also
one of the reason I didn't choose to go to an art school But instead I
was learning about social sciences.
I was learning about politics during my time of studying I mean, of
course right now my idea about art has changed a lot and my idea about
like if art school is something like I should consider change a lot, but
originally that's where I come from.
For me, art is for building infrastructure of imagination is when
I grow up, if it's not because of seeing those subculture things, seeing
those street art, I will not be here.
I will not ever think about.
Going abroad and like coming to Germany and leaving Europe and maybe
like go somewhere else in the future.
Even that's
Hollis: so great.
Thank you so much for sharing that.
I just love that phrase building infrastructure of imagination.
I think that like, absolutely perfectly encapsulates really what
the future money ethos is and why interledger is so interested in this
charge of like, how do we create?
And be creative around creating possibility and just as you've said,
how you personally and your life path was transformed by encountering and
being steeped in a city of art that was inherently political and wasn't gallerized
and wasn't kind of separated and cut off from like the politics of everyday life.
Um, could you tell us more about like your actual arts practice and medium?
I know we'll get eventually into the project that you're developing with.
the Future Money artist cohort.
But I'm curious about like your own personal path in
terms of your practice and
Xiaoji: medium.
When I first came to Europe, like I would say like my first real art
project is like a theater project that happened when I was really young.
When I just came to Germany, when it was like 2015, 2016, I started working with
community theater and documentary theater.
And it was largely because I was doing a lot of volunteering work.
with the local organization that were helping the refugees incoming.
And I was also always passionate about small theater and film and
cinema, like that was also influenced by my upbringing in my hometown.
So for a long time, I was working with storytelling
through theater and through film.
So I was also doing some moving images work and over the years I started to
experiment with different mediums.
So now I'm working with text a lot.
I work with audio.
I work with moving image still.
I still work with performances, but not strictly theater performances anymore.
And very interesting lecture performances.
And also right now I work with game as a medium, and that is also like the
project that I'm doing with Interledger.
Do you have a preference?
I've been thinking about that for a long time.
I think at the moment I am most interested in text as a medium of
art and I think that's probably not necessarily my preference because Of what
I'm enjoying to create with the most.
It's probably because that text is not usually seen as a serious art form.
Absolutely.
lawil: How do you then apply the text?
Because there are different types of things.
You can also do, apply it in that sense, kind of like in a,
where it's more design based.
So the focus is more about the aesthetics.
I'm not saying that the content doesn't have any aesthetics in them, but there
are so many different approaches.
What is your approach in that?
Xiaoji: I think I'm, I'm very interested in playing with first
narratives itself, and I think that's like a quite a common approach
when it comes to working with text.
I'm also very interested in, like, using different genre of writing, some genre
of writing that are very often seen as an institutional symbol, for example,
to play with those formats about, like, um, what kind of clashes different
genres of writing can do to each other.
So that's something that I also use with lecture performances and
in other performances I'm doing.
Very cool.
Hollis: So, maybe we can walk our way up into, like, from that origin of
theater and documentary theater and then diving into text, like, how did
you encounter and begin to explore games and the creation and design of
games as your art practice and what have you discovered through exploring it?
Xiaoji: The sort of like anarchist spirit and like anarchist thought behind
my artistic practice was something that also brings me to the game.
So studying like a lot about politics, I am not very interested in the,
let's say, in German hierpolitik, like, um, I like English, maybe real
politics as an approach to discuss politics and to describe, let's
say, how we make, political action.
I am very interested in prefigurative politics like as an academic concept.
It's very closely like associated with anarchism as an alternative
framework to examine like how political change can happen and to as a way to
describe not just for the The discourse focusing on alternative on what is
understood as a consequentialist way of analyzing political action.
I'm interested in prefiguration as a microtransformative structure to kind
of anticipate on what kind of future we want to imagine for ourselves.
lawil: The thing is that sometimes we could choose mediums and they just
have a certain type of attachments.
There is a aesthetic to it as well.
Xiaoji: I think I find it very often hard to describe what games means for me
because I don't grow up playing games.
When I was a teenager, when we had our first computer, my dad was always
playing, uh, you know, this game.
This game called red alert, you know, those super aggressive.
Oh yeah.
I used to play them as well.
Yeah, me too.
But I suck at them.
So I don't grow up playing this game.
When I was a kid, when I tried to find a game for me in the computer, I, I,
I played with Microsoft PowerPoint.
I thought that's the most fun thing in the world and front page so for a
long time game is not something for me.
I don't associate with being a gamer.
I don't grow up playing a lot of games.
I only started to discover game a few years ago because of my other project
Alien without extraordinary ability and because of that project I was thinking
Hard and long about what medium I should choose and like a good friend
was talking with for a long time about What do I actually need to do with this?
And I start to realize like I want to give a possibility for radical imagination
through this project I did some writing, I did some design work and I did a bunch of
stuff that I have no idea how to combine them together And at the same point I
realized that what I need is a game And I started to design games And I realized
how much agency I feel in that process.
Also how much agency that people feel when they are getting
engaged with the project itself.
Because you're not just an audience, you're not just a
reader, you're not just a viewer.
You actually get to interact with it.
There are other formats that you also get to interact with.
But what's special about game for me is the possibility of world
building, the possibility of blending reality and fiction and I started to
also play like indie games that are not like crazy strategy war games.
I wouldn't say I have a personal attachment to games, it just feels
like This is a medium that I can connect so many things together and
to have the necessary function for me to have a sort of like critical
engagement with certain topics.
I hope that answers the question.
It answers
lawil: the question, I completely understand also because of the, what
is it, the agency that games create because you, what is it, with games you
create rules that people have to follow.
Hollis: I'd love to transition into talking about the project
that you are working on, the Parallel Society, specifically as
commissioned by Interledger for the Future Money Artist Grant.
Would love to hear about how your concept of this developed.
Um, and anything you'd like to share?
Because I know that this isn't your first connection point
with interledger foundation.
So we'd kind of love to hear how you arrived at the concept of this
Xiaoji: project.
I think like financial inclusion as a topic for me
has always been quite relevant.
I think, um, especially as a women, women are.
very often disproportionately impacted by financial exclusion.
And even though I grew up in a quite like urban citizenship, uh, household
in China, where we have a sort of like a socialist feminist infrastructure,
where the double income family in China were quite high compared to
many other countries in the world.
Money has always been a topic that women are supposedly not talk about.
Women are very often not the one that actually like take control and have
access to a lot of financial services.
Another entry point for me to understand financial inclusion was also In
Europe generally financial inclusion has been seen as like quite a lot of
like what western and middle european country has achieved very high level
of financial inclusion or almost full but um as I mentioned before I used to
work a lot with migrants refugees and asylum seekers but I know with my own
eyes, that is not the case for them.
I know in my own eyes that many of them are quite excluded from the system.
They were very limited access for them.
And even for the Chinese immigrants community of second or third generations
in Europe, many of them still has a fear of the financial systems.
here and their fear of financial system exclude them from getting access to it and
a lot of their needs were not met such as currency exchange and also handling taxes.
I've seen the consequences of this sort of financial exclusion and this is what.
brings me sort of to this topic and brings me also to my project,
the Parallel Society project.
Parallel Society project as a project is a storytelling game that kind of explores
the financial inclusion as a topic by featuring the fate of the two characters
and what I What's interesting in this project was the two characters, one as
a migrant and one as a rural villager.
So usually in political discourses, migrants and local working class people,
marginalized local populations are very often pitted against each other.
I use the concept of parallel society is also a bit of a play in the world because
parallel society in the German context is, maybe in the whole European context is,
uh, It's a term that is used to usually describe, like, self organization of,
like, ethnic or religious minorities.
And after it was coined, there were a lot of, like, policy based on it, but there's
also a lot of controversy around it.
I am also not a very big fan of this term because of it puts emphasizes
on the minorities themselves to bear the responsibility of integrating
into a society where there aren't enough integration infrastructure.
So there were a lot of like discussion, like academic critiques of it, um, that is
used to describe this Group of communities that were being cut off from very often
access from the so called mainstream culture and in those kind of discourse,
integration and assimilation are usually used interchangeably, even though
they mean completely different things.
So this is a bit of my play with the word related to this.
What I want to highlight is not a parallel society between the
so called mainstream society.
and this minority migrants racialized population society, but the parallel
society between the migrants who are often caught up from excess and the local
marginalized working class population, rural population, who also often Echoes
the same struggles as, um, different form of marginalization and how their parallel
fates echo with each other, but are very often not seen as a parallel struggle,
but they actually are parallel struggles.
Hollis: Yeah, thank you so much for sharing all of that.
There's just so many fantastic lines of thinking that were really provocative
and I think just to call out my appreciation for recognizing that,
yeah, that, that when we talk about financial inclusion, we have to look
beyond this kind of self congratulatory Western accomplishment and just By this
concept of just by naming the concept of financial inclusion that the work is done.
Um, I just kind of love that call out.
But I think that what I hear for you too is like, you're problematizing
this kind of binary between like, the migrant versus the local or the
fallacy of That there's those who are kind of like native or were of the
nationality and those that are apart and recognizing that there actually is so
much commonality, whether it's between class or between economic experience.
And yeah, I'm curious, like to that end.
I specifically would love to hear what you've uncovered or
learned through developing this game of the Parallel Society as
part of the Future Money Cohort.
Xiaoji: I think like the first thing is that I am digging deep into, let's
say, different forms of struggles.
That are for both groups of people, maybe just for a little bit of context that I
came up with this idea also because of, um, let's say to actual news event and
one is the collapse of a rural bank in Henan in 2022 in China and the series
of protests that comes with it because of the collapse of a rural bank and the
second news is in Spain in Barcelona.
There was a news about two Chinese immigrants get millions of euro
from a group of other Chinese immigrants who does not have much
access to the financial systems.
And they promised to help them boost visa residency status and they also promised
to help them with currency exchange.
Um, and also Managing their funds related to their businesses that are many of them
do not really trust the Spanish banks and have faced like long term discrimination
and marginalization in the society there.
There aren't enough focuses put on, let's say, people who have, On paper, they have
the access, but why don't they use it?
Why don't they actually go into that bank?
Why don't they actually get in touch with those services?
These are the topics and like the struggles that I'm interested
in highlighting in my work.
Financial exclusion.
As their lived experiences, how does that influence their way of understanding
and thinking about finance and how does that influence their behavior
patterns, and how this experiences, if documented and understood can be used
to create better tools to help them.
So I was doing some research both on like digging into literature related
to it, um, such as like how different migratory phases for a migrant, how
does that correspond to different financial needs, what are for majority
of people the most important needs, and also about lived experiences of
like their fears, their struggles, their experiences of discrimination,
and their trauma, and their habits.
These are the things that I have been learning throughout the
experiences of doing this project.
I'm also very interested in the very like emotional embodied aspects of those
topics and like another thing that I've been learning throughout the process
of my work with the Future Money Artist cohort is that I felt like it was so
interesting to see Other artists and other practitioners, their perspectives
and their topics and their projects.
Because what I am working on is, I would say, a very, like,
micro sociological perspective.
And many of them are taking a different level of analysis,
different level of, like, Extracting different sort of like materials,
different experiences and different imaginations and how our imaginaries
of different levels in some way connects and interlink with each other.
And that's something I've been learning a lot.
throughout the process as well.
lawil: I also believe it's very important to have kind of like these different
uh levels or these different lenses on these projects and that's also
we on purposely within the selection process kind of like looked at the
diversity of the cohort as well.
So everyone's focus is very different.
I can
Xiaoji: see that and that's been really enriching for me.
lawil: I do have another question for you and it's kind of like,
it's about the current game, Parallel Societies, of course.
I'm very curious when it will be finalized, but what do you hope
people will take away from it?
Xiaoji: I think, um, what I wish for people to take away on it is, I would
say first is to sort of having this understanding about this divide and
dichotomy between migrant local dichotomy.
Like I want people to have this understanding of the arbitrariness
of this dichotomy, I would say.
And I'm also very interested in having, maybe not necessarily,
this is not a takeaway that I wish people to have, but like a dialogue.
That I wish to have with and around the topics of financial inclusion
beyond the very institutional skills, um, the emotional aspects and the
psychological aspects and the micro sociological aspects of like how being
financially excluded can influence your.
way of thinking, your way of interacting with yourself, with people around
you and with the society and how the sense of scarcity, how the sense
of exclusion creates embodiment in our body that cannot be very easily
taken away just because one thing has changed or one policy has changed.
I think that would be the takeaway that I wish people would
have after they see my work.
I
lawil: completely agree.
I also believe that's something within the entire conversation of financial
inclusion that should be highlighted more because it's very, it's forgotten.
Xiaoji: Yes, absolutely.
lawil: When do you think you'll be ready?
Because I really want to
Xiaoji: play the game.
I think it's, uh, next spring sometime.
Okay, cool.
Within the current plan.
So next spring.
Hollis: Well, we're really excited to see your work come to life, and I think
as we wind down this conversation, we're just really grateful for not
only your presence and willingness to talk to us, but just the depth and the
consideration and the Appreciate it.
Personal sense of purpose that you have throughout your work.
I know I'm, I'm leaving this conversation feeling really invigorated, and I think
I really am interested in the way that you chose the medium of gaming and
just to know that like, oh, gaming isn't necessarily something that like
I had in my childhood, but just how we can use more like irreverent mediums
to talk about weighty, you know, Political and economic issues, and I'm
excited to see it all come to light.
lawil: To learn more about the Interledger Foundation, visit our website where
you can find all of the published
Hollis: episodes and more information on our guests, grant programs,
and our resources at interledger.
org.
Xiaoji: Thank
lawil: you for listening.