Artworks / 30 Coins

30 COINS (2012)
video & art by Francesca Fini
photography by Federico Trimarchi

For "LowLives:occupy!", march 2012
performance art streaming event
partners: Occupy with Art / Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics New York/ Low Lives

I don't hate money, I love money. As an artist I need money to make my projects come true, I need them to buy tools, materials, to materialize my ideas. My creativity is conditioned by money. It's the deepest slavery of all, when the only freedom you have (creating) it is not possible without money. Artists are not free at all. Money becomes then an obsession. I Love and hate money at the same time, because I depend on them to live my inner life.
This is how society works today. Primitive, imperfect, corrupted in any possible way. We are all imprisoned in this matrix. Things are going to change and eventually men will be free from money, but as long as we have a little note in our hands we will keep going as we used to. Revolution always comes when you are already into the black hole even if they tell you there will be a light at the end. But things are going to change one day.

Sometimes people like to leave handwritten messages on bills, as if the money were the glass bottle of a shipwreck, the wall of a prison, the shirt of a teenager, the bathroom on the highway, a book of love entrusted with a confession dedicated to a stranger.
It would be interesting to trace the money trail, would teach us many things. If it is true that our fingerprints are like a signature that draws an invisible map of our life paths, a bill contains at least a small piece of everyone that touched it.
But sometimes there is nothing written on the bills, there is no human intervention, and then I read what is printed as the official message: "In God We Trust".
The aim of the performance is to engage a reflection about the real value of money. A money bill per se has no value, it’s a piece of paper with a virtual value attached to it. The crisis, the wild speculations, the sick market that is corrupting the whole planet is all about this hidden virtual value.
Burning money is a criminal offense in most countries, because it doesn’t belong to us.
No statement has ever been so true.
But there is also another aspect of the performance: reading the messages written on the money and releasing them to the flame, in the spiritual space where they really belong.