“What strikes us immediately in these transformed objects is their character of toys, jewels, talismans or amulets. They rarely exceed the dimension of the offering, the gift, and are comprised of equal parts of elements in our daily life, plastic rulers, pairs of scissors, strainers or sink plugs, and materials that were traditionally used as the famous archaic currencies that one day an accountant at the Club Med remembered: beads, shells, shiny metals, small bones, plants. It is through convenience that we speak of archaic currencies concerning the extraordinary objects, scarcely intelligible to us, used in North America or Oceania before colonization; the exact function of the Iroquois' wampum, the tevau of the Solomon Islands is still disputed. They were exchanged, of course, but most of the time in a ritual setting that went largely beyond that of a simple transaction, in the sense that let us say, the International Monetary Fund would understand it. it is because money was not born suddenly, even in our civilizations, in the mind of a start-upper wearing animal skins, who one day would have had the idea of ​​multiplying the exchanges, by inventing a universal substitute able to cast swapping into oblivion . First of all, money was beautiful, it circulated for itself in a ceremonial setting – of which nothing would give a better or simpler idea than the exchange, in the schoolyard, of Poulain chocolate images or marbles, for my generation, Pokémon cards for that of my children. It was handled with a sacred respect and frank joy. It was only very gradually that it became what we know today, in short, a lethal abstraction. The artists of the second half of the 20th century often dreamed of abolishing this money that they saw as a corrupting binder: Yves Klein threw gold into the Seine, Joseph Beuys pleaded for a return to swapping (the different path of their careers, early for the former, late for the latter, sometimes makes us forget that they were contemporaries: Klein was born in 1928, Beuys in 1921).

Silvana Mc Nulty, with the often flamboyant nerve of her generation, seems to me to formulate a slightly different artistic hypothesis, but one that is also quite sound – that of giving currency back its beauty rather than calling for its effacement, to create signs for a new, more elegant, more worthy and fairer exchange than the one that governs our lives. A currency, one could say, of the Mc Nulty republic, that is, a dreamed-of universe between childhood as such and the childhood of humanity. Have we suddenly realized that the financial disease that has blighted our world worsened with the growing dematerialization of money, the abandonment (in any official case) of the gold standard? If money today is virtually everything, is it perhaps because it is no longer concretely anything, and is no longer held in the palm of the hand that would feel its weight with fear and jubilation – the Club Med had clearly understood, by attracting its real customers with fake pearls. The reach of intuition must not be underestimated: in the general idea of ​​a repair of the world, the dream of a currency that is both primitive and new very naturally succeeds that of a less orthogonal rearrangement of objects, and gives us as much to see as to think about. After all, Kurt Schwitters isn't so far: hadn't he called his art Merz, by lopping off the first syllable of the word Kommerz? Silvana Mc Nulty has transformed the currency of the financial markets into a currency of admirable signs…” — Didier Semin

More information on the event can be found here.