Banknotes from Hell (and a suitcase a little too ghastly).

Many cultures believe in the afterlife. Some of them even use to bury material goods with the deceased or make offerings burning different objects to supply their dead with things they might need in the hereafter. As an example, we have the oriental "hell banknotes", “fake” paper currency that is incinerated in order to maintain good relations with the ancestors. But this is just one example of a series of customs throughout history, from placing a coin under the tongue of the departed, bury them with their properties, even, with their servants and soldiers, whether they were real or replicated in stone. But what is the imaginary behind all these habits? What is the relationship between the desire of possession and the survival of death? Is it possible to identify “having” and “being”? What is the relationship between identity and property? Doesn´t the idea of "owning" refer to the illusion of a permanent and indestructible substance?

Is it really possible to take something with us to the afterlife? For Brahmanism, for example, the concept of ownership generates from the illusion of one is separated from the universe. For a psychologist like Eric Fromm, the desire of possession arose from a modern society that was based on the material, power, ambition, jealousy and violence. Psychology has studied at length how we relate ourselves with money. Far from being logical and rational, this relation is rather emotional and unconscious....

Oxidizable money

In the feverish days of April 1919, while the former Soviet Republic of Bavaria was struggling to stay in power, an utopian negative interest currency system was expecting for its revolutionary banknotes to come out of the print house in order to be launched.

The brand new People's Finance Representative, Silvio Gesell's initiative was never to be implemented. First an internal coup d´etat led by Moscow and then the overwhelming attack of the Freikorps, the same militias that killed Rosa Luxembourg, ended with the Republic even before its new banknotes could even leave print house.

Gesell, a libertarian anarchist author of the book The Natural Economic Order, thought that money had had lost its usefulness as a tool of trade, becoming a commodity in itself, generating social inequalities due to usury and affecting real economy negatively. He thought that the solution to this situation was to create a new monetary system in which the currency would depreciate over time, thus preventing the possibility of being accumulated. According to Gesell, money should behave as goods do. Apples, a piece of furniture, a car, lose value over time. They rot, they wear out. In order for money not being something with which one could speculate and, for the contrary, being a simple tool of exchange, it should also be subject to this entropic process.

That´s why he proposed a kind of banknote to which after a certain period of time -one month for example-, you should enclose a postal stamp with the value “1%”. That is, its value should decrease 1% every month. To avoid this expense, he who received it, should rush to buy goods instead of keeping it.
What would have happened if this kind of currency has come into circulation in Soviet of Bavaria? We cannot know. But we can analyze what actually happened years later, in 1932 in Austria.
In the context of a depressed economy, and still suffering the effects of the 29 crisis, the experiment could be carried out, this time at the initiative of the Mayor of Wörgl, Michael Unterguggenberger. Inspired by Gesell´s ideas, he put into circulation the "Freigeld" (currency of free economy or currency of guaranteed circulation) ...

Art and Money

by Belen Gache

Snake oil, mailboxes, and land lots on the moon: from market economy to quantum economics (through artists ‘money)

Many artists have experimented with the notion of money, whether with paper money itself or with the monetary exchange system. For example, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Ant Farm, Fluxus, Arman or  Yves Klein. We will focus here on Klein´s piece of work Zone of pictorial sensitivity (1962). The piece consisted in the documentation of a buying and selling operation of an immaterial space that took place in Paris and that involved a check that was exchanged for a certain amount of gold. After this exchange, it was established that the check would be cremated and part of the gold would be thrown into the Seine in a sort of ritual or sacrificial act.

In the capitalist system, a trade consists of a private transfer of goods or services from one person or entity to another. But history records a series of operations that have been at least, anomalous, from pure and simple scams-selling snake oil, selling state mailboxes to particulars– to ambiguous forms outside every possible economic legislation-selling stars, selling land lots on the moon. The idea behind these forms of artists´ money and transactions has been precisely to reflect on such daily and taken for granted acts as buying and selling, being these on the basis of our social exchange system.

The sale, even more, the mere idea of possession is problematized in Klein´s work which can be framed in the context of the so called "poetics of dematerialization".

Cryptocurrency

From electronic money to 2.0 currency the Net allowes to imagine new exchange systems but also to repeat in the virtual realm usual errors of the actual system.

In almost 20 years of the Web existence, numerous examples of virtual currencies have emerged. On one hand, we have the currencies used in games or in communities such as Second Life metaverse. The economy in this virtual world is based on the Linden Dollar which current exchange rate in exchange offices fluctuates around 290L $ per 1EUR, varying according to the supply and demand laws and also to the currency emission of its “Central Bank”. The fact that not only the economies but also their land area of these communities lack of existence in the real world even increases the possibility of phenomena to which we have been getting accustomed due to recent crises in the real world: speculation attacks, bubbles, hyperinflation.

One different case is that of the Bitcoin, one of the first implementations of the concept of cryptocurrency, first described in 1998 on Cypherpunk email list by Wei Dai. Bitcoin allows holding and transferring values in an anonymous way. Being a decentralized electronic currency it is independent from the need of any central power making it impossible for any authority, governmental or other, to manipulate its value or increase its existence arbitrarily in order to generate inflation.

Nuclear Gypsies of Fukushima. The plot of an apocalyptic anime?

It was the 70´s in Japan. The growing demand for electricity in modern society made nuclear power plants grow as mushrooms. Meanwhile the Yakuza was making night tours around the cities recruiting beggars and social outcasts by offering them a miserable pay for doing allegedly cleaning jobs. Once taken to destiny they would discover that they had been taken to nuclear reactors whose interiors they were expected to clean. There, they were obliged to work under sweltering temperatures and were exposed to radiation levels tens of times higher than allowed. After that, they became Genpatsu Gypsies (nuclear gypsies) that once recruited were meant to wander from one central to another in order to do their jobs and receive a daily payment. That, until their body to resisted. The plot of an apocalyptic anime? No. A true story that repeats itself for more than 30 years in nuclear centrals such as Fukushima and that has caused as many deaths by radiation as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

The Zahir: the desire that eclipses the world

by Belen Gache

In his short story The Zahir, Jorge Luis Borges narrator is given by chance a 20 cent coin, a regular coin in Argentina of the time (the 30´s); one among others. Only that this one is special: it is a "zahir". This concept, borrowed from the Islamic folklore, involves an object that catches the attentions of the beholder to the point of completely obsess him and make him lose the sense of reality. Departing from the encounter with this coin Borges reflects on other famous currencies: Charon's obol, the obol that Belisario begged for, the guilder of Leopold Bloom, the doubloon of Captain Ahab. He also speculates on how each currency symbolize in a way the freedom of choice of he who owns it because, just as a magic item, you can turn it into anything else in the world.