Author: Corine van Emmerik
What the experts have warned for in the seventies has by now become reality. The invisible hand of Adam Smith has turned into an automated economy, a kind of black box that we cannot decipher or understand. Only the in- and output are aspects we seem to know. Today, after a major financial crisis, no satisfying or viable alternative has yet been set into motion, so we continue on the same foot as before. Economia, a three-day festival in the Baltan Laboratories in Eindhoven, tries to break out of this old way of thinking in order to reclaim economy as a social and cultural construction.