Rodrigo Azaola

                                           
                                         
Impunity Landscapes V, Mystic Monetary Theory
3D playable game.

Mystic Monetary Theory is a 3D interactive gamethat explores the disproportionate power held by central banks and the vulnerability of individuals to their disciplinary technosophy.

The environment is set against the backdrop of the 2019 Lebanese financial crisis, triggered by systemic corruption, embezzlement, and outright theft orchestrated by the highest ranks of Lebanon’s central bank in coordination with a loosely regulated banking sector.

Sonic and visual cues —such as Lebanese bank logos, news footage, sound bites from banks mission and vision statements, and protests soundscapes— are dispersed throughout the cave, interwoven with admonitions from the Merchants of Time, fictional entities that guard its depths.

Modern central banks rely on the supposedly apolitical independence and expertise of unelected and unaccountable techno-servants. At best, this is a constructed narrative about the true value of time and, critically, who is entitled to define it. At worst, these narratives mask decisions, that could even be criminal, with the potential to plunge entire societies into crisis for decades to come.

MMT places the player alone in a vast, unmapped cave system existing outside any specific place or time. Empty, hostile and devoid of emotions, the environment is marked by traces of both past and future ruins. Player mechanics are intentionally limited to endless roaming, observation, and enduring an unknown path with no clear beginning or end — mirroring the minimal agency and understanding that citizens have over how central bank policies shape their present and future lives.

MMT is both an archive and a sacrificial altar confronting the entanglement —anchored in fragile systems of trust and collapse— between modern finances and faith.


https://form.jotform.co/90458974361871



Modelab: nomadic initiative exploring historical narratives


Fin-crime. Weird economies. Spring 2025.


----- My work is an ongoing speculative research on financial structures and their factual repercussions over biological timelines and entities.


I’m a founder member of Modelab, an artistic initiative that explores public space by attending its past and current dynamics, with recent exhibitions at Chicxulub (2022); Les Traversées du Marais Festival, Paris; Taipei Artist Village, Taipei (2019); Manila Biennale, Philippines (2018), etc. In response to the pandemic lockdown, I launched Radio Ensayo, a decentralized web radio station focused on experimental sound practices and visual arts. Before, I worked with the H. Committee of Human Vindication, an arts collective that operated as a universal pseudo-organization founded in 1947.

Recently, I've been awarded the Mexican Endowment for Art Creators 2021–2023 (SNCA).

My writing on art, culture, and politics has been published in international magazines, such as Letras Libres, Nexos, Foreign Affairs, Artslant, etc.






“We have nothing to lose. I will go back to Walmart giving blowjobs behind the dumpster. I don't care. I just want you dead. I want Wall Street dead.”

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Names of shell companies associated with land and wealth (extracted from leaked financial databases)  and virtual land environments that permit financial flows serve as a chip-tuned side-note about how wealth is secretly deployed across jurisdictions.



Notions of value are transformed and dispersed; risk and gains occur as synthetic money and cryptocurrencies clash with national and international laws.

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Armida

A little better

1812

Phantom pain

Triumph

83+1

Tropical gulag

Museum of good



About

News



A little worse looks at the GameStop stock short squeeze of January 2021, a frenzy retail buyout fueled by the gamification of financial platforms and Internet forums. This was a rebellion of armchair bankrupt investors, in dire economic despair but flushed with Covid-19 cash hand-outs. For a few days, the narrative favored the bold, and fortunes were made and lost. I even took some stock positions, investing money from an art grant.

The narrative behind the short squeeze was that of a coordinated rebellion against hedge-funds' stern financial maneuvers, driven by amateur financial analysts calling to “make a stand” against Wall Street. The discourse was heavy in imagery  —emotions as a kind of capital—, but its encoded desires actually reinforced the system of behaviors demanded for the effective reproduction of capitalist power, including relations of class, race, and gender.

A little worse is a visual diary, from January to June 2021, of uncertainty and irrationality driven by global fiscal and monetary stimulus, but also of the emotions and aspirations of amateur shareholders and their justified and somewhat futile critique of Wall Street’s financial opacity. This memoir was made while realizing a 900% return on my investment.