EL CAMINO DE LA LANA
In spring 2022, Peter Stamer and I accompanied a 20-peso banknote on its way through the Mexican state of Oaxaca, and through it became acquainted with the people making use of that money. Every time the bills changed hands, the artists were transferred to the new owner as well.
This chase takes up from where Peter and his then collaborator Daniel Aschwanden left off more than ten years earlier when they followed two 10 and 20 yuan bills across China for four weeks and 4,000 km. It was 2009 and the world then was witnessing the beginning of a global economic crisis that is still in full swing and that has been dragging entire economies down since. A decade or so later, confronted with a radically different economic macrocosm —topped with the mainstreaming of rightwing extremism and the effects of a global pandemic—, it seemed like a propitious time to take a new look into micro-economies, and more specifically, at the “alter-economies” moving in and through realities such as Mexico’s.
More soon.
With support of the Federal Chancellery of the State of Austria, GARAGE e.V. Vienna, a.o.
