A big title for a small show: in your face hype to get you to come have lunch at an excellent vegetarian restaurant in Poblenou, Barcelona (the Aguaribay, c/Ramón Turró 181). Money and trash. Money as the ghost (or, in its paper form, the sheet of the ghost), the spirit, the impulse. Trash as the dead body, the material manifestation of specific, marketplace value after that material has been stripped of value. The show consists of watercolors and drawings and objects made from recycled or devalued (revalued?) materials.

The banknotes, drawn with ink or with watercolor, mock monetary value by representing outrageous sums, some microscopic, others astronomic. What could you buy with $0.0000000015? A microbe? Or $50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000? A solar system? Or…?

Some banknotes are realized on discarded paper or product packaging material with the aim of short-circuiting the positive and negative values we give to money and trash. One of these “trash” banknotes is realized on a sales receipt (for groceries), the amount of the note equaling the amount of the purchase, 23.23€.

Along with these banknotes, I’ve shown some watercolors of animals in groups or with half-human/half-animal figures, or with other figures that appear to be humans in animal suits, the line blurred between what is animal and what is human. Why show these with the banknotes? Perhaps because they too reflect on the question of value, on our place in the world with other creatures, on our commerce with other beings, on what we exchange or not with them. Animals are part of the immense underside of value (along with the general rape of the natural world and the exploitation of the labor of fellow humans) that feeds the marketplace. That’s one possible reason why I’m showing the watercolors of animals alongside the drawings/watercolors of banknotes. There isn’t, however, really a clear connection. I just felt like showing them.

Enjoy your lunch.