/// ARTEFACT FESTIVAL NOTES #11

(ENG) After the post dedicated to the unCloud project, we would like to share two more projects: Time/Bank by Julieta Aranda & Anton Vidokle and Macht Geschenke: The Making of Capital by Christin Lahr. The two art projects deal with money and time.

As you can read in the program: "Time/Bank is a platform for cultural and arts communities where groups and individuals can pool and trade time and skills, bypassing money as a measure of value. Time/Bank is based on the premises that everyone in the field of culture has something to contribute, and that it is possible to develop and sustain an alternative economy by connecting existing needs with unacknowledged resources.
Time/Bank is a platform for cultural and arts communities where groups and individuals can pool and trade time and skills, bypassing money as a measure of value. Time/Bank is based on the premises that everyone in the field of culture has something to contribute, and that it is possible to develop and sustain an alternative economy by connecting existing needs with unacknowledged resources."

For Macht Geschenke: The Making of Capital, the artist Christin Lahr took over the chair of the mayor of Leuven and spent the first week of the Festival at her workstation in one of the exhibition spaces, continuing her meticulous work. Quoting, once more, the festival program about the work she presented: “since May 31, 2009, Christin Lahr has been making daily money transfers of 1 cent to the German Federal Ministry of Finance, thus helping to counter the growing mountain of debt in small doses. In the field "reason for payment", she always writes 108 characters from "CAPITAL: A Critique of Political Economy" by Karl Marx. That way, bit by bit, the entire text of the book will be transferred into the state’s central account via online banking. The transmission of the roughly 15,709 cents and 1,696,500 characters will take about 43 years.”

We had the opportunity to talk with Christin about her work and we were the lucky ones to receive two original screenshots of the money transfer she made. Her idea is actually to substitute the money transfer numbers with the name of the people who have received them.