Set Margins’, ISBN 978-9083449821, English, 172 pages, 2024, The Netherlands

In the narrow field where artists have directly engaged with economic powers (such as Bureau d’Études), we can certainly include the systematic and intrepid work of RYBN.ORG. After their anthology The Great Offshore, followed by a spoken glossary on cassette, they have published another radical book with five ‘ready-to-use’ strategies for evading taxes and levies for social and environmental purposes. These notorious strategies (perpetrated in territories such as the European Union, the United States, the Bahamas, Liechtenstein, etc.) are illustrated by a series of flowcharts created between 2017 and 2021, fully exposing the financial engineering that successfully uses international mechanisms to circumvent any regulation and maximise profits no matter what. The detailed flowcharts are all contextualised by essays or interviews with respective critical experts: Pekko Koskinen, Citizens Against Bank Exploitation, Le Freeport, Melle Smets and Lora Verheecke. Like their previous work, this project uses art as a direct tactic – it proposes a visual codification of illegal processes and a consistent framing to expose them in a clear and understandable way. In doing so, what is elsewhere referred to as ‘investigative journalism’ is used as a fulcrum to open up, stimulate and activate processes of awareness and understanding.