ORACLE

Ignacio Navas

This is a computational photographic project that reimagines Luigi Ghirri’s work Atlante within today’s shifting financial landscape.

Where Ghirri used macro views of an atlas to read the world — describing mountains, cities, oceans, and deserts as a system of signs — ORACLE recontextualises that logic by shifting its focus to banknotes, turning emblems, portraits, seals, numerals, and national symbols into omens of market tensions, corporate expectations, and speculative finance. Every working day, a new image is generated by a procedural script driven by that day’s AEX opening values and the iconography of historical Dutch gulden banknotes.

The AEX is the flagship stock market index of Euronext Amsterdam. Launched in 1983, it tracks the largest and most actively traded shares listed in Amsterdam, acting as a mirror of the country’s financial promises. Euronext Amsterdam is often regarded as the world’s oldest “modern” securities market. Its roots go back to 1602, when shares of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (the Dutch East India Company) began trading, leading to a rapidly flourishing secondary market. The Netherlands was among the earliest centres of modern securities trading, where episodes of euphoria and market crashes were already visible and documented in the first full-length work devoted to stock exchange trading: Confusión de Confusiones by José de la Vega, a Spanish Sephardic Jewish writer and merchant exiled in Amsterdam. Published in 1688, this book describes everyday life on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange and 17th-century shareholders' activity as intensely speculative and highly sophisticated, revealing the psychology of markets and highlighting instruments and behaviours that remain recognisable today.

This project is being developed in the FUTURES Hub, in Amsterdam thanks to the FUTURES residency programme.