Eva Barto – The Making of the Lure, 2025

The Making of the Lure documents an attempt to produce a political satire about a debt-ridden Pinocchio, crowned king of debt and prepared to do anything to remain in power. As Eva Barto and her collaborators search for the money to produce the film, meetings and negotiations expose the scams, loopholes and legal fictions through which debt and credit operate. Edited as a loop without a fixed beginning, ending or on-screen credits, the work can be entered at any point, so that each viewing rearranges the relation between fiction and documentary. Barto turns the making-of format inside out: backstage material becomes the principal film, while the attempt to finance the satire uncovers the broader economic and political system sustained by debt, legal fictions and asymmetries of power, with cultural production emerging as one of its many expressions. Presented at the macLYON, the protocol Sharp Smile extends these questions into the exhibition space by exposing the negotiations of sponsorship and visibility that condition the production and presentation of contemporary art.

Eva Barto’s work takes the form of interventions that challenge and interrogate the economic and financial frameworks that structure the mechanisms of production, accumulation and circulation. Her approach reconfigures notions of property – both intellectual and material – as well as those of exchange, debt and credit, particularly within the legal and economic infrastructures of the art world, revealing their systemic logic.