The Swap is the third chapter of the PolEc Trilogy, comprising Wandering Marxwards (1998) and The Three Failures (2006). It features the same character as in the previous episodes, but now reduced to a lost, exhausted soul roaming Shanghai's cityscape from the remotest periphery to the financial district. Another narrative, spoken this one, takes us to September 2008, as gigantic bailouts put the financial system on life support instead of letting it collapse, thus seizing our reality and replacing it with a fiction tailored for the situation. These two streams end up meeting on a Shanghai dancefloor, where unresolved contradictions can finally be performed.
Michael Blum
Bake He
Cao Lu
Cherry Wang
Choi A Ran
He Zhijie
Jia Junjie
Liu Huiling
Qian Yunqiu
Yangsu Ruyi
Yang Yahang
Zhang Wanying
Zhu Er
Zhu Li
Sara Di Donato
Paulina Przeniczna
Yulina Semenova
Paul Han
Scott Pelley
Milton Friedman
Ben Bernanke
Joseph Stiglitz
Slavoj Žižek
Henry Waxman
Saskia Sassen
Phil Donahue
Michael Bloomberg
Margaret Thatcher