Grammar of calculated ambiguity

Gabriela Löffel works primarily with time-based media, focusing on the grey zones of political and financial structures, as well as the infrastructures that sustain them. Her practice involves shifting and translating documented immediacy into the realms of interpretation and staged re-enactment – strategies that characterise her working process. This approach often results in long-term projects that open up critical spaces for questioning and introduce breaks in linear narratives. She is particularly interested in the obliqueness of subject and context. It is within this gap – brought about by her unique method of engaging with her subjects – that her work fosters reflection on how we construct meaning in a world increasingly shaped by the fragmentation of knowledge.

The video installation Grammar of Calculated Ambiguity is based on an audio recording made two weeks after the publication of the Pandora Papers, during a conference of the offshore finance industry. The event was open only to professionals from the financial services sector—trustees, lawyers, wealth managers—insiders often regarded as the architects of offshore financial structures. The financial industry bears a significant share of responsibility for current global emergencies such as the climate crisis and the sharp rise in inequality. Examining these structures and infrastructures forms the core of the project.

The audio recording was made during a panel discussion on public perception of the financial industry. Due to the recording conditions, several passages are difficult to hear, disrupted by ambient noise. In order to recover the words lost in this noise and confront the content, Gabriela Löffel invited a group of experts into a sound studio to collectively analyse the recording. The group was filmed throughout the process of careful listening, dissection and analysis of the audio material, as well as during the construction of their collective narrative.