The Interledger Community 🌱: Xiaoji Song

Shifting Power in the Informal Economy — ILF Ambassador Final Report

Xiaoji Song — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 04:51:41 +0000

Project Update

Concluding the Interledger Ambassadorship with a lot of gratitude and reflection, the project Shifting Power in the Informal Economy is an attempt to reveal and modify a structure that might be too big to be captured through tangible and translocal works. Over the past half a year, I connected with diverse movements, civil society actors, and digital financial inclusion advocates. Through research, advocacy, and community work, not only did I gain a deeper insight into the structural factors that impact those who are in the informal economy and at vulnerable positions, but I also started to build networks and coalitions that I thought were not gonna be possible.
Of course, I can't move the earth in half a year, but I did believe that in the process of repeating trial and errors, this project has fostered mutual knowledge exchange, strengthened grassroots organizing, and enhanced understanding of the multifaceted exclusion faced by informal workers. With 5 conferences visited, 2 in-person community events supported and hosted, and several online workshops and consultations with project partners, the project is ending with a lot of promising directions and new connections.

Progress on Objectives, Key Activities

Connecting Movements and Political Communities: 

The project undertook detailed stakeholder mapping to identify civil society actors, grassroots collectives, and institutional partners in Berlin and Madrid. Based on the power asymmetry among relevant stakeholders, I tried to connect diverse civil society stakeholders through in-person events.
In Berlin, I hosted the panel talk and community hangout for labor organizers and activists from three different organizations: The event featured a panel discussion first joined by Aju John from Migrant*innen für Menschenwürdige Arbeit, Lea Rakovsky, Ban Ying e.V., and Gabriel Berlovitz from MigLAB Ug, featuring food provided by Antifascist Curries.

Photo credit: Mesa

In Madrid, I supported two queerfeminist activists who have been long-term involved in community building for the Chinese migrant, diasporic, and exiled community, for hosting their first community workshop on "Black job" and financial inclusion, as a large percentage of Chinese communities are unbanked or semi-banked in Spain, and have their own informal networks and infrastructures.

Screenshot from the workshop Common Struggles and Financial Imaginaries

To get this conversation started is only the very first step; through the project, I leveraged the lived experiences and expertise of the communities and tried my best to connect them through workshops and consultations. In the banner image, there is a screenshot from an exercise on linking financial access with structural factors. Throughout my project, I have developed the online workshop format Common Struggles and Financial Imaginaries. By testing the workshop formats with several community leaders across Berlin and Spain, I utilize this workshop as a way to conduct expert consultation in a group setting, and then build solidarity across communities and movements.

Capacity Building and Materials Development: 
Through the contribution of 3 project partners, I have produced the first draft of the educational materials YOU(WE) DESERVE BETTER: A Community toolkit, incorporating exercises like barrier mapping, storytelling, and roleplay, empowering workers to articulate financial exclusion experiences and build collective awareness of digital financial rights. The plan is for this material to be edited, designed, and distributed to diverse stakeholders in the following month, including organizers, cultural workers, and informal workers communities.

Outreach and Community Engagement:
 Throughout the project, including Interledger Summit 2025, I have attended 5 conferences in Portugal, Germany, Mexico, Japan(Self-funded), and Malaysia(Self-funded) that have significantly expanded my network and the potential reach of the project. Through these conferences, I got to build potential future networks of collaboration in supporting the communities and presented my work in progress to diverse stakeholders.
One highlight is the possibility of being involved in the planning and program of the Interledger Summit 2025. It was an absolute honor and privilege to be able to join the Interledger team in Mexico in May and meet the rural communities that are supported by Interledger's work. It has strengthened my belief in the importance of bringing in the perspective of underrepresented communities into spaces and discussions they are often in. This encouraged me to invite and bring labor organizers and lawyers who are not often in spaces and discussions on our digital financial futures to co-facilitate the Workshops From Financial Inclusion to Financial Justice at the Interledger Summit, creating participatory spaces where activists who are working daily with gig workers and experts explored systemic tensions around platform-induced precarity and why a fair and just financial system is so urgently needed, but hard to realize.

The project involved multiple written outputs to report on research outcomes through literature review and qualitative research, hosted events, and media advocacy efforts. All drafts are ready, and now in the final editing process, waiting to be published:

Research Report: Financial Exclusion, Platform Capitalism, and Translocal Labor Justice in Berlin and Madrid, draft ready, still in need of editing and feedback.
Blog: From the Frontline in Berlin: Navigating Informality in Transnational Labor Struggles, finished and waiting to be published.
Blog: Beyond Flexibility: Reimagining Financial Justice in the Gig Economy, finished and waiting to be published.

Collaborative works that are currently in the final round of editing before publishing:

Community Toolkit: to be designed and distributed.
Policy Brief (Co-writing with Ayden Férdeline): to go through the final round of editing.

Project Impact

One of the major goals of this project has been to create spaces for dialogue across political movements and communities that center the struggles of workers, voices that are often ignored, and to bring labor issues onto the agenda for a wider, more diverse group of stakeholders. I firmly believe that financial inclusion and labor struggles are deeply interconnected, as the very architecture of the contemporary financial system is linked to the capitalist structures shaping all workers’ realities.
During the participatory workshops at this year’s Interledger Summit, the word “risk” repeatedly surfaced. Our entire financial world is fundamentally built on risk, which frequently limits efforts toward financial inclusion: innovation inherently involves risk-taking, and exclusion often stems from perceived risk profiles. While mitigating and understanding risks are crucial to making financial inclusion feasible, the question remains: Is this enough to build a truly just financial system? What would a financial system that is not based on speculation look like? These are important questions that nobody has answers but I wish to carry forward in future work.

I can confidently say that I have fulfilled my intended impact by carving out spaces for dialogue and knowledge production wherever I identified gaps.

Concluding Remarks

I am extremely grateful not only for the past half a year but also for the past years of being part of the Interledger community. I have learned and grown, and built real connections here. I am immensely grateful to be given the space to try out new ideas, work in my own way, and bring the voices of communities that are often not heard and understood. I know it is not possible to have this extent of support, trust, and freedom in every ecosystem, and I am sincerely grateful to everyone who made this possible, and for many meaningful conversations I have had because of ILF.

Shifting Power in the Informal Economy: Implications on Digital Financial Inclusion Strategies — ILF Ambassador Progress Report

Xiaoji Song — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 13:19:22 +0000

Project Update

What is the informal economy in Europe, and how are they structured, formed, and understood by different communities who are involved in them? This was the major question that I kept coming back to in the past few months of research outreach. Despite this being the most basic question and the starting point of my research, the insights I gathered throughout my research and outreach process have continuously challenged my assumptions of what economic informality means in the European context. These assumptions not only challenge our understanding of the nature and scale of the informal economy, but also how digital financial inclusion can be done and strategized in our globalized world.
In the past months, I have conducted extensive literature research, mapped out diverse relevant civil society stakeholders, built 5 project partnership with NGOs, grassroot communities, and community-based organizations, talked to 20+ community leaders from civil society stakeholders who represent or work with 5 distinct communities who are often involved in the informal economy in Berlin and Madrid, with more talks and interviews being scheduled and conducted. In the project updates, I want to revisit some of the assumptions on informal economies and how they are challenged in the European context, with the case studies from Berlin and Madrid. By re-visiting these assumptions, I also start to rethink what strategies on digital financial inclusion can lead to a better world for those at risk.
To start with, I want to first give some context and background.

Informal Economy: What exactly do we mean?

Key Insights:

Informal economy is economic activities, workers, and economic units that are, in law or in practice, not covered or insufficiently covered by formal arrangements.
From the informal sector to the informal economy, the nature of the activities and their definition are defined in relation to the development of modern industrialized societies and capitalism.

The informal economy involves economic activities, workers, and units not fully covered by formal arrangements, like labor laws, social protection, taxation, and business registration.
The understanding of the informal economy has evolved through the work of organizations like the ILO and WIEGO, alongside academic contributions. Early ILO work focused on the informal sector as unregistered, unprotected enterprises. A significant shift in 2002 broadened the scope to the informal economy, encompassing all economic activities and employment relationships not adequately covered by formal arrangements, even within formal enterprises. The 2023 ICLS further refined this, focusing on “informal productive activities.” This evolution reflects a move from viewing informality as a characteristic of enterprises to recognizing it in diverse employment forms due to trends like globalized employment schemes.
Research directions distinguish workers and enterprises in the informal economies as they refer to different theoretical priorities and policy concerns. As my project focuses on labor rights and vulnerabilities in relation to digital financial inclusion, in this project, informal economies can refer to: informal workers, infrastructure in relation to informal economies, and informal economic activities, with formal-informal linkage being emphasized.
In this project, I focus on informal workers and infrastructure as a way to understand informal economies in Europe. Through my strategic outreach, I reach out to community leaders and civil society groups who are already representing the workers or working with the workers, instead of conducting direct interviews of the informal workers communities, as a way to create a larger impact, but also to protect the privacy and security of those informal workers who are in vulnerable positions. I study the overlap of financial and informal infrastructure through mapping and participant observation in field work in Berlin and Madrid, to uncover the hidden labor and unspoken part of the informal economies, and trace the mechanism and patterns of how the informal economies are constructed in the first place, and how the ecosystem can be maintained in the urban textures.

Formalization Debates

Key Insights:

Formalization is controversial as it proposes dualism between the formal and informal economy; however still worth persuasion for labor right protection.

The term “informal economy” gained rapid support from development experts as a way to acknowledge the economic activities of the urban poor in the Global South. However, it soon faced criticism for being poorly defined, grouping diverse activities, creating a false dichotomy with the formal sector, and implying the latter's superiority. Anthropologist Lisa Peattie noted a cyclical pattern of criticism and redefinition, suggesting a shift towards comparative studies of specific economic institutions and policies instead of trying to refine the concept itself. This is exemplified in the Kenya report and the dualism it uses to describe Kenya’s economy.
Formalization debates are one of those long-standing debates that are a result of such critical reflection. Formalization is rather a controversial process among workers. The myth of formalization holds superiority over informal work in terms of labor conditions is not always true in all cases. Effective formalization should be multi-faceted, progressive, context-specific, and co-created with informal workers. Some scholars suggest alternative approaches focusing on reparations or improving informal work conditions without formalizing.
In Europe, however, the formalization debates vary from worker to worker, from community to community. While European regulations do not focus on formalization, informal workers are often those who are in vulnerable positions already. While formalization often can be seen as controversial for workers in the global south who are comfortable with their alternative economic structures and community-specific accountability mechanisms, formalization is indeed seen as a strategy to improve their vulnerable positions.

Berlin and Madrid as Case Studies

Berlin and Madrid are exemplary case studies for understanding the informal economy in Europe due to their roles as multicultural urban centers with dynamic migration patterns. They represent contrasting cases as major cities of Spain and Germany, respectively, also providing implications on the core and periphery of the EU, as they are located in Western and Central Europe, and Southern Europe. Spain and Germany both have significant informal economies, as Spain’s informal sector is estimated at 20.2% of its GDP and Germany’s informal sector is estimated at 11.7%.
These two cities are chosen for several reasons:

Similar patterns and conditions as migration societies;

A large part of vulnerable communities in the informal economy are people who identify as being part of different migrant communities. Spain and Germany share similar patterns and conditions as migration societies, with both urban impacts, labor market implications, and transnational networks created by migrant communities being particularly relevant and comparable.

Access to communities and emerging movements;

Communities in the informal sector are not the easiest to research about, due to legal contradictions, lack of trust, and fear from informal workers who are often in vulnerable positions, high risk in the empirical process, and often diverse political contexts these communities are subject to. The choice of case studies is significantly influenced by the existing access to communities through direct involvement with community work and activism in the past decade to support migrant, diaspora, and exiled communities in Germany & existing diaspora activists' network that links communities in Spain. In the past years, there have also been emerging groups and movements that connect diverse informal workers being built in Madrid and Berlin.

Regulatory differences and European implications;

Even though Germany and Spain are both subject to European-level regulations, they have different regulatory environments that impact the scale and nature of informal economic activities. The differences in labor market regulations, taxation policy, and administration, and overall regulatory quality provide implications for effectiveness and diverse ground realities regarding EU-level frameworks.

Bridging from these contextual backgrounds, I want to share some sneak peek of my initial findings through examining the five common assumptions of informal economies (Some of which I also used to believe, or are often assumed in research and advocacy around informal economies).

Assumption 1: Economic Informality Leads to Vulnerabilities

It is often assumed that economic informality leads to different levels of vulnerability. In my own project description, I wrote “economic informality leads to exclusion and precariousness”. This, however, sharply contrasts with how informal communities often frame the problem. "Informality” is not a problem to be solved: it is a symptom of many different hidden social, economic, and political problems. It is rather a two-way street: vulnerable conditions can lead to communities seeking informal economic activities as a way to repair, but such informal economic activities can lead to more positions of vulnerability, depending on local regulations, practices of law enforcement, and public perceptions of informality in different localities.

Implications on Digital Financial Inclusion Strategy:

We need to acknowledge that formalization and access to digital financial services do not always directly solve the problem for the vulnerable communities. An effective and community-centered digital financial inclusion strategy needs to be an active process of taking the existing vulnerabilities into account, which are often structural inequalities. Instead of plugging the digital financial services directly into vulnerable communities, the question can be how digital financial services can be used to solve barriers that are the result of larger contextual and structural issues: from lack of identification, to biased algorithms on money laundering, to bureaucratic hurdles in insurance.

Assumption 2: Communities Involved in the Informal Economy are Always Vulnerable

Informal economies are not exclusively composed of vulnerable communities, as is often presumed. While formalization policies and enforcement measures frequently focus on vulnerable populations—who indeed represent a significant proportion of informal economic participants—wealthy individuals and enterprises engaging in deliberate tax evasion also constitute a substantial share of informal economic activity and GDP. These actors are typically more difficult for authorities to detect and regulate. Moreover, community dynamics within informal economies can be complex; exploitation of informal workers may originate from influential or senior members within the same community. This is common among communities that experience different levels of social exclusion, which often reinforce hierarchical structures within the communities that further alienate certain groups from broader labor regulations and protections. This phenomenon is particularly prevalent in migrant communities. Ultimately, it is workers who possess pre-existing vulnerabilities that remain most at risk within the informal sector.

Implications on Digital Financial Inclusion Strategy:

For digital financial innovation to support inclusion, we need to be specific about which communities we are actually addressing. This is particularly important for the narrative shift in the political discourse around the informal economy. Which communities need to be included through digital financial inclusion work? And which groups of people are intentionally conducting evasion and exploitation? The answers to these questions often contradict the realities and have resulted in harm and distrust. Digital financial system design must be grounded in an awareness of the full spectrum of participants and complex community hierarchies in informal economies.

Assumption 3: Informal Economies are Hidden and in Shadow

Much of the research on informal economies has been conducted to understand the context of developing countries or the global majority economies, but from the perspective of the countries leading the economic globalization. The characteristics of informal economies in these contexts differ significantly from those in Europe, where informality was the norm; formalization is a process that accelerates due to industrialization and the rise of neoliberal capitalism. It is assumed that informal economies are hidden and in shadow, through taking the “formal economies” for granted. This assumption is not true in many countries around the world, as they are very visible and still constitute a large part of their economic structures. Through the research, I examined this assumption in the European context, and it is partially false. The vulnerable communities that are involved in the informal economy are often partially hidden: they hide their informal infrastructure. However, many groups who are involved in the informal economy are using the formal economy as the vehicle of their activities: subcontracting in the gig economy, for example. Existing financial infrastructure is their informal infrastructure.

Implications on Digital Financial Inclusion Strategy:

To support the digital financial inclusion of vulnerable communities involved in informal economies in whatever localities, the formal-informal linkage is an important research direction. As the formal-informal linkage often reveals layers of intentional exploitation versus structural exclusion. For example, strategies can focus on making mainstream digital financial products more adaptable and accessible to hybrid users, ensuring that compliance, onboarding, and transaction monitoring do not penalize or exclude those whose informal activities are intertwined with visible, formal systems.

Assumption 4: Civil Society Stakeholders Align on Values and Approaches in Supporting Communities in the Informal Economies

Contentions are everywhere, as it is assumed that business interests, regulators’ perspectives, and civil society often have differing positions on realities and strategies of inclusion. However, even civil society stakeholders have vastly contrasting approaches and values on how vulnerable communities in the informal sector can be supported. Is it more effective to mobilize social movements or resort to political negotiation within larger institutions? Shall we apply for this funding to support this group of people standing in front of us in need of urgent help, or shall we only do mutual aid, as the responsibilities that come from certain funding can pose restrictions on the work scope? Shall we join alliances that directly address the issues our communities are facing, or refuse to engage in knowledge politics that might lead to policing of communities in the long term? When there are vulnerabilities and risks, there is contention. This contention exists beyond the frames that we often assume. Supporting communities in the informal economy is one such case with a particularly high risk. This is exemplified in the continuous debates on sex workers’ rights and protection.

Implications on Digital Financial Inclusion Strategy:

Contentions are part of the process, coalition is more likely to build on assuming the best out of each other, and walk out of our direct alignment based on normative positions. Contentions exist because we are fighting against challenges in real people’s lives, and it proves that we care. Such tension shapes how digital financial products are designed, highlighting that the real challenge in digital financial inclusion is not just technical deployment, but managing the ethical and political contestations over data privacy, community autonomy, and the unintended consequences in technological development.

Assumption 5: It is Possible to Understand Economic Informality Locally

Similarly to our common assumption on hidden and shadow informality, there is an old image of the informal economy that is often highly connected to local textures and is done in analogue and local infrastructure. This is no longer true due to the accelerating development of the global platform economy, transnational networks, and human mobility. It is not possible to understand how the informal economy works and the conditions of the vulnerable communities in the informal economy through learning the regulations, social contexts, and infrastructure in one locality where they are currently operating. The relevant infrastructure, particularly for informal economic activities in Europe, has moved to digital platforms that are transnational. The relevant financial services and exclusions are also transnational. WeChat, for example, has evolved to be a major platform for informal economic activities for the Chinese diaspora and migrants; cycles of debts also very often start from the countries of origin for many migrant workers.

Implications on Digital Financial Inclusion Strategy:

In light of the transnational nature of contemporary informal economies, digital financial inclusion strategies need to extend beyond local or national frameworks and explicitly address the cross-border dimensions of financial access and exclusion. This requires designing digital financial services that can seamlessly operate across jurisdictions, accommodating transnational remittance flows, debt cycles, and digital platforms. Inclusion efforts should recognize that vulnerable communities in Europe’s informal economies often also rely on financial infrastructures rooted in their countries of origin, which shape their economic resilience and risks. To be more specific on potential pathways, for technologists and designers, digital financial tools may incorporate culturally and linguistically tailored interfaces that avoid harmful design patterns, interoperability with foreign financial systems which can potentially be enabled by Interledger Protocol, and policy practitioners may engage in global level policy work that advocates for protections against exploitative cross-border financial exclusion cycle.

Progress on Objectives, Key Activities

Connecting different movements and political communities

I have finished most of my literature research and interviews, and am still conducting ethnography of relevant infrastructure. I am progressing well in my civil society stakeholder mapping; the results will be organized and made available for the Interledger Community when the project is finished. I have identified some key communities and actors to engage with. In Berlin, this includes labor organizing communities (particularly the informal ones beyond the legal trade unions), migrant advocacy organizations, and Vietnamese communities and districts. In Madrid, this includes trade unions, migrant advocacy organizations, and Chinese communities and districts. I have engaged with all identified communities through informal discussion, semi-structured interviews, except for trade unions in Madrid so far. I have mapped out the academic and political discourse and relevant concepts, and tried to draw connections with these particular communities. For example, how is formalization perceived? What even is the informal economy? (Many communities do not know this term, as they have their own way of describing the nature of their labor) What is economic justice and empowerment? And what is financial right and financial justice?
Throughout my conversations with them, we have discussed the particular contexts of their communities, what financial technology and financial inclusion mean for them, and how the Interledger Ecosystem can potentially contribute to their work.

Capacity building for civil society actors, cultural workers, and grassroots initiatives:

I am in the planning process for this objective. I am currently building a partnership with Berlin-based organizations MigLab who connects migration and labor; educator, lawyer, and founder of Migrant*innen für Menschenwūrdige Arbeit and Delivery Charge Podcast Aju Ghevarghese John; and Banying, one of the oldest organizations in Berlin that supports female migrant workers who experienced violence. Through consultation and collaborative research and prototyping, we are gathering community insights and developing toolkits. In Madrid, I am in conversation with grassroots Chinese diaspora activists and Asociación Rumiñahui on further collaboration.

Outreach and dissemination targeting communities in the informal economy

I have not started with this objective, as this is the plan after the second objective is completed.

Key Activities Update

I have first been in the research process of reviewing literature, relevant debates, and existing work, and tried to draw connections between them with digital financial inclusion. I have finished a strategic outreach strategy based on my research.
I have progressed far in the empirical process: I have talked to 23 community organizers from different kinds, so far: they range from a co-founder of an NGO, to queerfeminist activists, to trade unionists, to artists who work with community mediation. I have done 6 recorded interviews so far.
My outreach has been progressing significantly: I am planning a group consultation session with project partners, and an in-person event in Berlin that invites the project partners to be in public conversation with each other on intersectionality in labor struggles and the relevance of inclusive financial systems in transnational labor.
I am now on a field trip in Madrid, conducting partly ethnography, and partly interviewing and meeting with potential partners.

Project Impact & Target Audience(s)

The project brings together civil society stakeholders, community leaders, and organizers from different informal workers groups: domestic workers, gig workers such as delivery workers, workers in the hospitality industry, migrant workers of different backgrounds (female workers who are victims of human trafficking, Chinese migrant communities in Spain, South Asian workers communities in Berlin...etc.) refugees, asylum seekers, and sex workers.
The project provides space for them to get connected and strategize together, connect diverse struggles, and raise awareness on their common struggles. They are often excluded and underserved in the current financial systems. Many of them are not often in conversation with each other, and are also not included in the political process that impacts their digital rights and financial rights as workers. The project emphasizes how an open-source and interoperable financial system is particularly important to improve their conditions and seek financial justice of these communities.

Communications and Marketing

I have not discussed my work in public, to my knowledge. I will think about it and do something in the future.

What's Next?

From Research to Community: Collective Imagination of Financial Justice

As the updates suggest, I am aiming to build trans-local communities that support the economic and financial justice of vulnerable communities involved in the informal economy. Several events are being planned in this direction. I need to also confirm and consolidate my connections with potential partners in Madrid.

From Community to Advocacy: Shifting Power from the Ground

The goal of the project is to leverage our collective knowledge production and newly built alliance to work together with the Interledger Ecosystem and shift power to the workers on the ground. This will include drawing from their insights to contribute to research reports and potentially policy advocacy outputs.

Community Support

At this point, I would particularly appreciate:

I would be very grateful if anyone could give me feedback on the initial findings and assumptions on the informal economy: what do you think from your work’s point of view? Have you held these assumptions, or did you think differently? Does my implication on digital financial inclusion strategy seem realistic to you and your area of work?
If anyone has knowledge on the technical and regulatory process of financial services in relation to informal workers and vulnerable communities in the informal economy, I would love to chat. I am particularly interested in relevant processes and cases on conditions of undocumented migrant workers and gig workers working under subcontracting, as they are the most relevant to the cases I am working around right now.
I would love to start conducting more marketing and communication efforts regarding my project. If anyone has any contacts or strategies, I would love to learn from you! And as always, I am very often for a chat on your thoughts, ideas, and feedback on my project, no matter if it is relevant to the two points I mentioned above!

Additional Comments

I am extremely grateful for the last few months of support from the Interledger team, many insightful interactions that bridge a lot of my knowledge, and continuous learning on the Interledger Protocol.

Shifting Power in the Informal Economy: How to Research and Build Towards a Trans-local Community for Economic Justice

Xiaoji Song — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 19:09:41 +0000

Hi, strangers, old friends, and new friends!

It is Xiaoji (she/they) again, I am mostly based in Berlin, and now sending you greetings from my hometown Wuhan. I am here to explore and show some glimpses of how Interledger Ecosystem can support the needs and wants of the informal communities: As I am honored to be part of the 2025 Ambassador cohort, I want to introduce you to my project Shifting Power in the Informal Economy, and to share some updates and thoughts.

Rethinking Informality

Informal economies are not marginal—they are central to how millions of people survive and build community. From street vendors and care workers to sex workers and undocumented migrants, informal workers sustain themselves and each other through everyday practices of resilience. Industrialized societies rely heavily on their labor, even as they continue to deny them recognition and legitimacy. Yet the people behind these economies are often pushed to the periphery—excluded from labor rights protections, shut out of financial systems, and rendered invisible in the very policymaking spaces that most deeply shape their lives.

Informal economy is not often discussed in the case of Europe. In a continent that boasts over 90% digital connectivity, the needs and struggles of informal workers in increasingly digitalized financial systems remain widely overlooked. This project begins from that contradiction and the belief that people navigating informal economies already hold essential knowledge and strategies for survival, care, and resistance. It aims to explore how digital financial inclusion efforts from the Interledger ecosystem can support the improvement of labor rights and more just economic frameworks for informal communities—while building networks to shift power toward those most often left out of relevant political processes. Through research, strategic outreach, capacity building, and co-created tools, the project seeks to understand how we might not only improve access but also reimagine the very systems that have excluded these communities in the first place: how is the informal economy influenced by the colonial and imperial continuities? how is the global division of labor shape the demographics and condiions of informal workers? what kind of system provides reparative economic justice and financial rights for those who were still impacted by these systems?
I know these are big questions, but I can only start step by step: The project begins with Berlin and Madrid as case studies, focusing on the lived realities of undocumented people, migrant workers, sex workers, and others who are often involuntarily excluded from financial infrastructures. Their economic lives are shaped not only by lack of access to formal work or banking, but by complex legal restrictions, regulatory invisibility, surveillance, and the deep social stigma that marks certain kinds of labor and bodies. Despite these conditions, informal workers organize, support each other, and resist. This project is about recognizing and amplifying that work—not prescribing solutions, but asking what kinds of infrastructure, knowledge-sharing, and alliances can support what’s already being built from the ground up.

Rather than approaching financial inclusion from the perspective of onboarding “the excluded” into existing systems, this initiative starts with a question in mind: What would digital financial ecosystems look like if they were shaped by the experiences and demands of informal communities themselves? Through partnerships with grassroots initiatives, civil society groups, and cultural practitioners, the project aims to address the conditions and systems that concern these communities through knowledge production, community-centered toolkits, and other peer-learning opportunities that create space of contact and address the specific conditions these communities face—while also building trans-local relationships that can support wider movements for economic justice.

My Past Practices

As the cover picture is from our final rehearsal of the theater performance Home Again co-created with refugees and migrant communities in the German-Dutch border almost 10 years ago, I am now a Berlin-based artist, activist, performance-maker, game-maker, and researcher. This project is building on top of much of my past practices and interests in the economic and financial imaginaries, as well as how they impact different communities that are historically impacted by interconnected systems of injustice. As someone who has been working with migrant(ized), diasporic, and/or exiled communities in the past 10 years in Europe, I noticed how often economic and financial struggles are left out of the immediate discussion. As these struggles directly affected the communities I was engaging with, the knowledge and regulatory barriers of the financial systems scared not only these community members away, but even those who wanted to support them away. After being introduced to Interledger's work and community by the 2024 ambassador and the current lead on public policy and government affairs Ayden Férdeline through the Interledger Summit, I am grateful that Interledger has supported some of my exploration of the "why" behind such a situation. Through my research for The Parallel Society, a research-based game prototype, and a video installation, I dived into how the imaginaries of these systems create invisible barriers for those accessing them. Through moderating the panel discussion Financial Inclusion for Undocumented Communities: From Strategies to Practices with Malou Lintmeijer, Savannah Koolen, and Eunice de Asis from Stichting Here to Support and FinTech Strategist Sarah Habib, we dived into what context-specific political conditions influence the identification of the undocumented communities in the Netherlands and the UK, and what kind of potential strategies and practices that support them; through the Interledger Salon, I get to chat with theater practitioner Anuja Golsalkar and Fintech strategist Sarah Habib on how our differing understandings of money and the financial system shape our access to and engagement with them, and to what extent money and other currency can be considered a public fiction through the episode Beyond Currency: Reimagining Money and Digital Futures.

Beyond my work supported by Interledger and materialized with Interledger Ecosystem, I also have been actively participating in the transnational labor organizing space in Berlin, and last year contributed to the booklet Reshaping Labour: Intersectional Insights About Work, Labour, and the Job Market with my essay titled Dreaming Feminist Economy, initiated by BIWOC*Rising Berlin.

In my practice, I often use text, games, social practices, and performance to construct critical fabulations around bordering practices, notions of security, and alternative economies. This also entails, that I often work with and discuss the parallel and connection between different oppressive systems and power structures. Hence, my practice is often about shifting power, through restoring the agency of many communities and the epistemologies that were repressed in such interconnected contemporary systems. Beyond such practice, in the past 10 years, I have also worked often with the migrant and refugee communities that are involved in informal economies to target their immediate need: to give them space to tell their stories, to accompany them when they face discrimination, to provide literacy workshop, and many more.

But I know these are not enough. Literacy is not enough, when the system is unjust. Learning how to navigate through a system that is not designed to be fair and just, will work towards inclusion in its immediate form and need, but cannot support these communities in the long term. I believe the work the interledger ecosystem is doing has the potential to go beyond this through building a global and interoperable payments network, not only significantly reducing the barriers of these communities but also providing new political possibilities of how global finance can be done. While I will keep doing my community work that supports inclusion as an active process, I am here to explore the potential of supporting financial inclusion through connecting movements for economic justice: to shift power, we need to recognize that the financial system does not stand alone, it is a continuity and result of many historic and current decision-making done through different hegemonic structures. Through my research on the case of Berlin and Madrid, I hope to shed light on this perspective and connect the Interledger Ecosystem with the communities and initiatives that are already on the ground, trying to shift power.

An Open Invitation

I hope I get to work with many of you! I have been always impressed by the diverse expertise that Interledger community members hold, and I am excited to know more about your work.

If you believe your work is of technical and infrastructural relevance to these communities' conditions and needs, I would love to be in conversation; if you have essential knowledge of the regulatory landscapes that shape these communities' survival, I would love to be in conversation, If you are someone working within or alongside informal economies in Europe—whether you’re organizing around migration/border, labor rights, digital rights, sex work, or economic justice—or part of a community that resonates with these concerns, I would love to be in conversation.

This is an open invitation, if in any way that I have mentioned, or not mentioned, you see a way that we can collaborate, or even if you just want to exchange about our work and give me some of your thoughts and feedback, please reach out to me via Email or Slack!

The Parallel Society — Future Money Final Grant Report #2

Xiaoji Song — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 23:17:07 +0000

Hi, It is Xiaoji (Xiao Xiao) again. I write, research, perform, and play mostly in Berlin. I work with bordering practices, notions of securities, and infrastructure of alternative political imaginaries. Together with Yve Oh and Yumo Cheng, I founded the interdisciplinary art collective EAST ALIEN COMPANY which negotiates with our curatorial, performative, and time-based practices. In the past months, I can gladly say that I am concluding a milestone for the Parallel Society project.

What is the Parallel Society?

The Parallel Society is a cyber drama taken in the form of a web-based game and interactive fiction on narratives of two main characters: In what ways do a migrant who journeys thousands of miles from their homeland and a rural villager who has only known the town adjacent to their birthplace echo, despite their seemingly disparate backgrounds?
The Parallel Society explores the poetics and the politics behind the stories of historically marginalized communities: by featuring the parallel fate of two characters, a Lebanese migrant in Barcelona and a villager in rural China's Henan province.
The narrative comes down to a format like the 1993 film Groundhog Day, the stories unfold through the retelling of the same stories repeatedly. The audience and player will be trapped in a time loop, where they are invited to re-live the same events repeatedly and make different decisions on how they, as the character in the game, would act.

Project Updates

Through the past few months of the development process, the project now is in the form of both a video installation and a game narrative prototype: the game now has two entry points for two characters' stories and three acts for each of them. Based on the materials from the video installation, I further developed my research and game design with the support of the TuesdayJS game development tool and created introductory tracks, scripts, and visuals for each of the theatrical acts.

Progress on Objectives

Research Updates
In this period of the project, I have two main research questions:

Despite the many academic and policy-oriented definitions of financial exclusion, What exactly are the forms of financial exclusions experienced by the two targeted communities I am working with? How does it manifest in their lived realities?
Considering the importance of the decision for a format like Choose Your Own Adventure game, how does that influence their decison-making process?

Financial exclusion often means "not having access to financial services" narrowly defined as not having a bank account, and "unbanked population". This does not include many who have faced barriers in accessing other financial services despite owning an account, for example, migrants who do not have access to the financial services in the country they reside in but only informal economics networks. The project decides to focus on digital financial exclusion beyond institutional and bureaucratic exclusion as a result of long-standing marginalization. e.g.: the marginalization of migrants in society and, the marginalization of the rural population. Financial inclusion is key to economic empowerment, and lift people out of poverty, and the instruments used vary. However, research has also shown that in quite many countries, financial exclusion or semi-financial exclusion (semi-banked) are voluntary: but what do we mean by voluntary? If one faces racism and lack of access in dealing with financial institutions and decides to not use their provided services on paper, is this voluntary or not?
For the two communities I am targeting, another important factor of their voluntary or involuntary exclusion is access that is connected to the restriction on their freedom of movement. The case of comparison here is the increasingly intensified application of digital technologies in the external bordering practices of the EU and the internal bordering practices of China, and the production and reinforcement of relevant socio-technical imaginaries and spatial imaginaries. Legal scholars such as Paula Pasquali has concluded that the external territorial and legal borders of EU that are the results of a few historical developments such as Lisbon Treaty, and the internal administrative borders of China which are primarily centered around Hukou system, have much in common in its legal modalities and influences by similar economic rationale and securitization tendencies.

These barriers that are not necessarily directly created by financial institutions create higher costs for them to enter the use of financial services provided by financial institutions, which very often are connected with other social-political systems that impact them: for example, the main reason for involuntary financial exclusion for a migrant is the lack of appropriate or accepted document.
Looking again at the concept of 'voluntary' exclusion, it is helpful to understand decisions being made in dealing with financial institutions or financial technical systems as a form of economic behavior. Then the question becomes a more general but rather interesting one: what drives people's economic behavior? There are for sure, many reasons, but following the temporal framework by Elena Esposito, here I quote: 'There has been a great deal of discussion about the role of expectations in economic behavior. Expectations are nothing more than a present reflection on an uncertain future and an attempt to build up an orientation.' What constitute expectations and are connected to expectations, are emotions and imaginaries. It is not news that emotion is extremely important in decision-making, the psychology as well as cognitive science behind decision-making have been playing a key role in advertising, sales, and even scams, for example. The below image is a framework for understanding the connections between emotions and expectations from a psychology research:

Imagination, on the other hand, was also influenced by emotions and influenced the projected expectations of actions. Social imaginaries as a framework often refer to the shared cognitive and normative disclosure of how a society could function. Imagination here matters not only in the sense of determining individual behavior but also in how society can function through symbolic orders. People often find it hard to imagine what's outside of their lived experiences without some external push: in this case, their lived experiences are categorized by the lack of mobility and access. I have drafted my framework of decision-making as below:

To be more specific on the communities, I also did mapping for the needs, barriers, emotions, expectations, and imaginations of the villagers and the migrants based on both literature and conversations. During the mapping, I have identified some of the most important financial services needed by them: remittances and loans. I have also found out that intrinsic survival needs are not always the same as financial need: the financial need can be easily compromised if it seems contradictory to their most important long-term survival need.

Game Design
Based on these research results, I have designed the games using the Tuesday JS visual novel engine: a simple web-based, free and open-source visual novel editor that can be used in a web browser. It is written in JavaScript without using any third party libraries and thus does not require additional software installation. The engine uses standard HTML5 document elements such as div and img. This allows the use of any media format supported by browsers including vector graphics svg, gif animations and css styles.
The game and the cyberdrama will take the form of interactive fiction, and I wish for it to be less like a simulation of choose your own adventure, and more like an interactive poetic intervention that triggers and collages different sensory loops that are relevant to the characters' experiences of exclusion, and their re-living of different decisions before their death. The choice is based on the experiences and feedback gathered from the Open Studio exhibition. The game should function as a form of digital poetry and non-linear narration, where based on the choice of the audience, it showcases different narratives.

The incentive structure of the game is driven by both the poetic narrative and the 'access visual'. The game will feature two visual codes of 'access' that represent whether the character has access or not: for the rural village, the access is based on the color of the 'health code', and for the migrant, the access is based on the identity document. During the 2022 Henan Banks scandal, the government staff changed the health code deliberately to prevent the protests. However, the visuals of the game serve only as an illusion that represents the shadow from the past. The actual narrative is represented by the sound and the text in the game.
How do people know what decisions to make? This is probably the most relevant question for a choose your adventure genre. It is not a plain story here: since emotions, expectations, and imagination are so important for decision-making. If we want people to make different decisions, we have to encourage people to imagine differently and feel differently.

The most important incentive structure is based on this concept: the decisions the audience needs to make while reading the story are based on two things:

The audience has to choose among different options of 'feelings' and 'thoughts' by the characters, and the actions that follow the feelings and thoughts will only appear on the next page.
There will be a hidden variable 'Imagination': the hidden variable is an indication of the capacity of imagination, with each choice the audience makes, the game will be secretly keeping track. Certain choices and content will only be visible if the players have a certain score in their 'Imagination' variable.

Each of the stories has three acts, and each of the acts has different stories each time one plays, each act has an opening audio track. With the support of the media artist Yve Oh, these tracks are produced as important world-building materials. To give an example from Act II in the story of the villager, the track is edited with a recording of a police phone call between a victim of the 2022 Henan bank protest, some audio recordings from the streets of the protest, and a press conference on financial stability in the UK. Through this track, I want to showcase the soundscape of how financial stability in news is disclosed differently in people's actual lives, to show the contrast as well as the echoing themes in these recordings.

Check the audio track for Act II

What’s Next?

I am yet in search of the better way to publish the project and there are still quite some details to polish on my side. The first thought is to publish online, but I am considering making it adapt as an entire website, instead of publish as just a game at Itch.io. I am also in search of opportunities to showcase the video installtion and the cyberdrama in a group exhibition.
I am very interested in exploring the world of digital financial inclusion further, the deeper I dive into the topic, the more I understand the urgency of it, and the importance of building a movement around the topic.

Community Support

Same as before, I would love to hear your thoughts on my creative process, and on the topics that I am working on. What are your personal relationship with money, and financial systems as a whole? Are you in touch with any immigrant communities and communities from rural areas who are historically or still excluded from the financial systems? are you interested in how your work, being a new technology, policy, other forms of innovations, and undefined practices might be helpful for a shared future vision of a financial future with equity and inclusion? Maybe now, even more on how you imagine, what kind of imaginaries do you have when making economic decisions?
Let us read poems, watch video clips, play games, and share our dreams with each other.

Additional Comments

I am very grateful for the opportunity to develop my work in the framework of Interledger and to have the opportunity to develop my research and art practices further by showcasing my work to diverse audiences that I would not usually have the chance to get in touch with. I am also so grateful for the support of the whole team to give understanding and tangible support to my non-linear process for the non-linear narrative. It's been a pleasure to work with everyone!

The Parallel Society — Future Money Progress Grant Report #1

Xiaoji Song — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 04:19:51 +0000

Hello! I am Xiaoji (Xiao Xiao). I am an artist, researcher, activist, and community organizer based in Berlin but my heart is always in my hometown Wuhan. Many of you, I have already met in Costa Rica, and many of you I have not yet met, nice to virtually meet you!
I have had already conversations with many of you on what I care about the most, feelings, emotions, politics, politics of emotions, the mix of all these, the things that are not always comfortable to talk about but are extremely relevant for all of us. To have these critical conversations, we need a space with a sense of safety and community care, but also a space that allows radical imagination. That is also what my work is often about: to facilitate critical conversation in a safe and caring space, and to build infrastructure for radical imagination.
This is also the kind of work I wish to do with my project, as the Interledger FUTURE|MONEY grantee. I am incredibly honored and grateful for having the opportunity in trying to stimulate some dialogues and poetic imaginaries on how the future might hold in our everchanging financial systems through the lens of our personal relationship with the financial systems we reside in. So as promised, I am here to provide some updates on the specific progress in the past months.

Project Update

Like any other art project I have done in the past, the Parallel Society is a bumpy road. In the past months, I have worked back and forth by iterating my methodologies, mediums, creative focus, and narratives. However messy the process is, I am happy to say that I have manufactured a concise structure with some tangible and poetic sketches to pave the way for the coming months of production time. Last month, in November 2023, based on the current progress, I gladly had the pleasure of participating in the Open Studio Exhibition during the summit. With the help of Lawil, Chris, Kokayi, Ayesha and Hollis and many many other wonderful artists, staff, friends, I manage to put together a video installation that fits my vision, with a velvet blanket, gold dusts all around, and a mirror as the screen for my poetic interludes. My video installation features three visual poems on the emotional relationships the characters have with money, which was visited by many, and helped me to start so many intimate and incredibly relevant conversations. It was truly a powerful experience to see people connecting with my work, and sensing that it has been meaningful for them.

So, what is the Parallel Society actually about?
To first introduce the project: In what ways do a migrant who journeys thousands of miles from their homeland and a rural villager who has only known the town adjacent to their birthplace echo, despite their seemingly disparate backgrounds?
The Parallel Society is a cyber drama that explores the emotional dimensions of being historically marginalized and therefore excluded from financial systems, by featuring the parallel fate of two characters, a Lebanese migrant in Barcelona and a villager in rural China's Henan province. The game sheds light on financial traumas, such as behavior patterns and psychological impacts as results of financial exclusions experienced by these two characters, and radically imagines a world where such barriers no longer exist, but the characters are still trapped in the old pattern. The fictional borderless state is an "in-between afterlife", a mystical dream-like world they were transported to after their deaths.

During the last months, I managed to have my vision slowly turning into reality in the visual and literary spaces, but am still working out the design of incentive structures for the interactive part of the game. The current research and experiments are showcased in the video installation, and I was invited to a panel talk that is relevant to my research. The following is my specific progress.

Progress on Objectives

Research Updates

I often work with community-specific experiences: The Parallel Society project aims to target two specific communities: migrant communities who often face assimilation pressure without any support to navigate the bureaucratic violence in their society, and the rural working class who face limited mobility, access to educational resources, and financial services. These two groups share a disadvantaged position due to financial exclusion resulting from multiple barriers. In the backstory of the project, a migrant was scammed by a currency exchange scheme targeting the diaspora and committed suicide after realizing the money was gone, and a villager who lost his life savings in a rural bank collapse due to local government corruption and died in a protest, with no access to other financial services due to the Hukou system's strict internal mobility control. Both stories are based on real events that have received limited media coverage. Despite both characters and the communities they represent being historically excluded, they are often pitted against each other in political discourse due to the media framing, asymmetry of information, and financial traumas that have influenced their ways of living, expressing themselves, and seeing each other.
In the past months, I spent the majority of my time conducting extensive research for writing and designing the narrative of the game. Trained as a social scientist, but worked often in the interdisciplinary arenas, I often work with a mix of artistic research and qualitative research methodology. Firstly, I was focusing on the emotional aspects of financial exclusion, the embodiment of inclusion and exclusion by drawing from literature ranging from sociological, and psychological to philosophical contributions. This supports me in narrowing a few exploratory domains on the directions that my project would go, for example, this study on the embodiment of (non)belongings has been an inspiration and have given a range of analytical angles that opens my understanding of "belonging", and see how it can be of relevance to the topic of the financial system as a whole. I have also summarized a few thematic that often occur in literature, trauma, anxiety, sense of belonging, bureaucracy, lack of access, sense of time, and trust. I have also noted, for immigrants and villagers, the different but also parallel occurring thematic: for immigrants, avoidance, overspending, frugality, lack of trust, semi-banked, and fraud are common statutes; for villagers, the common themes are money avoidance, under-earning, frugality, sense of scarcity, semi-banked, governmental restrictions.
To touch upon these specifics, I have also conducted research based on the contexts of the two characters, immigrant communities in Spain and the rural population in China. In both Spain and Henan, China, distinct financial challenges confront immigrant communities and the rural population, respectively, with noteworthy parallels. Immigrants in Spain, often younger and residing in lower-income households, exhibit disparities in possessing financial products compared to native-born individuals, as highlighted by the Survey of Financial Competences and research reports, similarly, the rural population in Henan faces compounded challenges due to the restrictive Hukou system and the fallout from the collapse of four rural banks in April 2022. The Hukou system limits access to vital services, mirroring the financial exclusion experienced by immigrants. The banking crisis, stemming from financial misconduct, prompted widespread protests among the rural population, emphasizing shared frustrations and the need for central government intervention to address systemic issues and economic vulnerabilities. Recognizing and addressing these disparities is crucial for fostering social and economic inclusion in both contexts.

Game Design: Narratives

Based on this contextual information and also research findings about the dimensions of the lasting impact of exclusion on marginalized groups' emotional relationship with money. I started to write the biographies of the characters. By embodying these characters, I started to write monologues and poems that are based on these monologues.
To give an example of one of the poems written during the process:

I always fantasize that I get to have a pick

I often say that I do not remember that day
When the news hit, I smelled the burned pig fat from the oven
Spanish police took 4 days to process a request from me
Overslept, with doors open
The lady from Shanghai came into the restaurant
With sleek promises
Showering the standing 53 years old immigrant with affection
Resting, with doors open
The swift account creation with an oily phone screen protector
Half broken, with cracks
Stand up, shall we?
Resting our case
After 24 years and 5 months, after 2 restaurants and 3 children, after boat and dragon
We stand, up and upside down
Too many missed accounts
Your father needs this, she said
I cannot jump up and refute
The tangling feeling, the rash
The ever-evolving landscape of the nation, >nation states, states of the nation
States of leaking pipes, hovering over my >ears
The sound of counting the clicking >hallucination of integration
Between the lady from Shanghai and the lady >from the front desk
I always fantasize that I get to have a pick

Multimedia and Installation

In the meantime, I started to collect and organize visual materials that share similar codes with the poems and characters I am developing, from footage of money to the archival footage of political memories that are relevant to the characters. I produced in this process the video poetry for the Interledger exhibition: the Poetic Interludes.
By putting together one poem that represents the lived experience of the immigrant community, one that represents the lived experience of the rural villagers, and one poem that represents their parallel experiences, the video installation prompts visitors to look down to the mirror below them, which are placed on top of a red velvet blanket and covered in gold dust.
During the Open Studio, I invite everyone to step on top of the velvet blanket and read the video poetry together with me.

Other Progress

In my original proposal, I have proposed some goals I wish to achieve, when I have a chance to connect with such a diverse community of technologists, policymakers, artists, community organizers, and other practitioners in their fields trying to change the world for the better.
One of the goals is that by promoting greater visibility for the long-term psychological impacts and relevant behavior patterns of the communities affected by financial exclusion, I want to create more possibilities for these marginalized communities to be seen and heard, and also for topics such as emotional relationships with money to be of bigger relevance in the discourse around financial inclusion. I gladly want to share that I think I have managed to make progress in this goal of mine. Besides all the wonderful and sincere conversations I have had with the visitors of the exhibitions and the new friendship formed in the process, I was also honored to be invited to a panel talk hosted by Raashi Saxena and joined by Victoria Coker and Julaire Hall on Women of Color Reshaping Financial Inclusion. It was an absolute blast to share a stage with these inspiring, outspoken, sharp-minded women. Together, using our diverse sociocultural backgrounds and situated knowledge, we discuss our experiences with the ILP community, as well as open payment standards, on both personal and systemic accounts. By analyzing and comparing our diverse backgrounds and best practices with advancing gender equality in our fields, we brought about our visions and proposals for how the financial services by ILP can support women of color from diverse backgrounds all around the globe.
Additionally, The Parallel Society project aims to inspire more participatory design in the research and development process of relevant tools in the open payment system ecology. By highlighting the underlying behavioral patterns resulting from financial exclusion, the game invites players to imagine and work towards a more equitable financial system, and to engage in democratic technological governance by empowering affected communities to understand and participate in the debates and development of such systems. I also consider my participation in the summit to be a huge step towards this objective, through the dialogues I had the privilege to have during the panel, as well as in the continued exchanges during the summit period.

Some More Thoughts...

What’s Next?

So, the next steps are quite clear now!
Generally, embrace the messiness in the process, and embrace how messy and complex the reality is for the marginalized communities I am working with. For the coming months, I will be busy taking these lessons and thoughts into the development of the incentive structures and the narrative and thinking about what forms of inclusion work and open payment standards application would actually support these communities in need. Specifically, I will start to get in touch with developers, build the web of narratives, and start to translate them into an interactive journey for real.

Community Support

I would love to connect with you, in whatever ways. Your lived experience and feedback would be of immense help. New and old friends, let's get in touch! I would love to hear your thoughts on my creative process, and on the topics that I am working on. What are your personal relationship with money, and financial systems as a whole? Are you in touch with any immigrant communities and communities from rural areas who are historically or still excluded from the financial systems? are you interested in how your work, being a new technology, policy, other forms of innovations, and undefined practices might be helpful for a shared future vision of a financial future with equity and inclusion?
Let us read poems, watch video clips, play games, and share our dreams with each other.

Additional Comments

I am so grateful for the past few months: As a migrant from a diaspora family, I did not grow up hearing stories about people like myself and looking at artworks that reflect my lived experiences. Now as an artist, I believe it is my responsibility to lift marginalized communities' lived experiences to the stage of being seen and heard, creating dialogues in caring and safer environments. To achieve this, I focus on crafting socially relevant and community-specific experiences. In my past projects, I worked with migrant women, refugees in Germany and the Netherlands, villagers in rural Bulgaria, and political dissidents of authoritarian regimes. I want to create experiences that matter to them and bring their perspectives into the urgent public conversations of our time. This is very often not easy to have resources that support me to bring my work to a diverse audience beyond the art world regulars in the institutional structure I often work with. I am therefore incredibly humbled to have the opportunity to bring these marginalised experiences to you all through my work here.