Registration until March 1st, Deadline for Submissions March 1st
Call for Submissions: artists, architects, designers, creatives, collectives . . .
Currency as Space
HDLU, Zagreb, Croatia
HDLU Treasury and Mint, Zagreb, Croatia
Open call:
The exhibition BORROWORROB in conjunction with the HDLU Treasury and Mint is holding an open call exhibition for the design of currency. Entrants are encouraged to design a paper currency or alternative for the geopolitics of space. 50 projects will be exhibited at the HDLU, 10 projects will be selected by an international panel for publication and commentary and receive an award. Deadline March 1st, 2014.
In what way can your currency be used for two different spaces? Could each side represent a different value or function? Could each side be used only in a specific location for a specific exchange? What spatial distributions occur through the functions of your currency and what are those functions?
Currency:
Currency is a space and at the same time a medium which distributes and spatializes things, people, money, and services in varying ways, with varying intensities, geographically and psychologically. The objects to which it was once tied (gold), has changed, and its point of reference which has been replaced will be replaced yet again. Currency and space have quasi-fluid and quasi-stable functions. But a mechanism of exchange is not the same thing as the forces which have assembled it. How do we analyze those forces?
Exchange:
What if those forces were never about equalizing relationships, mediating flow of goods and services, cancelling debts and promises, but rather a form of exchange in which something hidden is exchanged for something apparent, like a dream, as two sides of surface that never intersect? What if spatialization were the primary function of currency?
Space:
Space is not homogeneous, it is composed of forces. There is a difference between entering space and leaving space, between acquiring space and losing it. Space is asymmetrical.
Asymmetry:
The difference between what it takes to earn money and what it takes to spend it is also asymmetrical. The relationship between currency and space is not new, but its ability to distribute people, things, and relations are not always the same from place to place or from one historical moment to the next. So the question operating in this Open Call is how does currency spatializes people, their things, their relations? And how might that asymmetry be folded, doubled, inverted, and transformed into other functions?
Economic questions are not new as a form of artistic practice that shuttles between political and social research. But the variations of protest which many artists are drawn and which articulate economic, social, and political asymmetries, are simultaneously articulated as spatial conflicts which seek legitimacy and symmetry in relation to other forces in which space is opened and closed, bordered, claimed and distributed, tracked and counted, occupied and dispersed.
*Borroworrob: In Search of Symmetry is generously supported by FACE Croatia, The City of Zagreb Office for Education, Culture, and Sport, The HDLU Treasury and Mint. Additional Support provided by The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, Epson, The Sheraton, Stay Zagreb.
