Bank Job
Bank Job was five years in the making and involved setting up a ‘rebel bank’ on a High Street in North East London, printing money and selling this as artworks in order to cancel and literally explode £1.2 Million of debt.
It became a feature documentary film ‘Bank Job’ that launched into 2021 lockdown and premiered at the prestigious Toronto film festival Hot Docs. It won ‘best documentary feature’ at Aesthetica Festival and was nominated for Grierson and British Independent Film Awards.
It became a book of the same name telling the story of debt and the work of undertaking a Bank Job. Artefacts from the project from printed money and bonds and exploded golden transit van are exhibited and in the collections of institutions from the British Museum to the V&A.
“A brilliant, but serious, comic caper with all the style and panache of The Italian Job – and the heart and soul of the best in British social activism”
Bank Job began in a trip to find out more about the work of Strike Debt in the US buying up and destroying medical and student and led into a deep dive into economic education from key thinkers Ann Pettifor, David Graeber and Andrew Ross. It asked the question “Are we, here in London UK, living in a ‘creditocracy’ where debt is increasingly wrapped around access to basic human provision from healthcare to heat?” and set out to expose and tackle systemic economic injustice through a hyper local lens on global finance. The challenge became how to tell an engaging story of debt and the answer came in a community heist on the financial system - giving ourselves the power of central banks to print money and decide where investment was urgent and required.
We took over a former High Street co-op bank turning it into HSCB (Hoe Street Central Bank) which came to be known as the ‘rebel bank’ and for over a year the bank was filled with money printing, events and debate employing local people and creating a hub of economic education on the high street.
The HSCB bank notes featured local people fighting the fallout of an unjust system - leaders of food bank, youth project, homeless kitchen and local primary school. A local team was employed as ‘money printers’ working with letterpress, screenprint and foilblock. The banknotes are in the collections of Fitzwilliam Museum, William Morris Gallery, British Museum, Museum of London, V&A, Bank of England Museum, Smithsonian.
The banknote artworks were sold/exchanged for sterling and raised £40,000. £20,000 was invested in these organisations, £20,000 enabled us to buy up and destroy £1.2Million of debt on the secondary debt markets.
The debt was cancelled quietly via spreadsheets but then publicly, literally exploded in a golden ‘debt in transit’ van in front of the towers of London’s Canary Wharf in an action called ‘Big Bang 2.’
The explosion was funded by people across the country buying bonds with the promise of return on investment being a piece of the explosion (in the form of coins cut from or cast from the metal of the van).
Big Bang 2 continues to travel and was recently exhibited at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in the exhibition ‘Defaced!: Money, Conflict, Protest.’
Bank Job the feature documentary film continues to screen. It is represented by Dartmouth Films in the UK and Cinema Politica in Canada and Europe.
“A necessary and genius piece of work”
“ A rock’n’roll history of where it went wrong and how it can start to go right”
“Bringing a deeply imaginative, beautiful rebel swagger to staid debate about debt. I love absolutely everything about Bank Job: its persistence, its guts, its compassion, its attention to detail and beauty”
