Only one thing is predictable at the Casino of Tricks, which will be moving into the festival centre for eight days: sooner or later, the guests will break the bank with their tricks. The reason is that they can earn chips, which can be changed into real cash for every trick they bring along – all manner of tricks: magic, economic, political, mundane and extraordinary. Be it seduction or shop-lifting, residence permit, levitation or skiving – these are the tricks we have mastered, the tricks that we would like to master, and perhaps the tricks that master, i.e. rule, us.

The geheimagentur – an independent label and open collective – produce situations that appear fictitious but then turn out to be very real: the aim of the Casino is to collect, trade and teach tricks. Visitors can carry on with trickery, manipulate the exchange rate, multiply (or lose) the stakes while playing trick roulette, in a trick battle, at the trickster’s lectern or simply at the bar. Until the money is all gone. For every day, the Casino spends more money, converts more capital into even more tricks, and thus gradually transforms itself into an academy that no longer circulates money, but tricks.

Tricks are a special form of knowledge not concerned with the way the world is, but rather with how it may be used or turned. Sticking to rules is a thing of the past. Today we are all encouraged to be tricksters, we are living, as it were, in an economy of tricks. The only question is: with what tricks do we meet it?

Konzept / Idee: geheimagentur

Mediathek