The Drachma Project

An interview given in the occasion of my residency for...

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:18:00 -0400

An interview given in the occasion of my residency for transmediale, mentioning also the Drachma Project, published in the weekly magazine Athinorama (an equivalent of Timeout or Zitty).

On Monday the 24th of October the German artist Olav Westphalen...

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:13:00 -0400

On Monday the 24^th of October the German artist Olav Westphalen hung a large print of his work “Drawing Of My Last Deutsch Mark Coin”, drawn in 2000, shortly after the Deutsche Mark was phased out, across the gate of the Athens Polytechnic University on Patission Street. Westphalen was invited by the Drachma Project in Athens, which also proposed the location. The drawing should be still there available for viewing.

The display of the drawing of the 1 DM coin in such a politically loaded location, the site of the students uprising against the colonels in 1973, has multiple connotations in the context of the current economic crisis that has devastated Athens. The dependency of Greece on foreign, particularly German, financial support comes at a high pice in terms of the political sovereignty of the country and also of the well-being of its people. Monetary and fiscal policy lie in the centre of public discourse and government policies, substituting political considerations of national independence, social justice, even democracy with the imperatives of economic policy. The importance of the monetary system becomes apparent, being both the cause but also the solution for many of the troubles that the greek society is facing. With the euro, comes austerity (and corruption), without it probably, chaos and poverty. The question of course remains how to divide the costs of the restructuring of the greek economy and how to wage the negotiations democratically. The Westphalen’s drawing could also be seen a price tag for the Polytechnic School, a further reminder of the privatization of higher education and the debate around cuts, student’s unionism and the independence of the public university in Athens. Is this drawing just another reminder of the crisis in greece and its european (maybe even German flavor). Obviously so. A gesture of protest against the brutal and impoverishment of the greek society. Of course. But it also a beautiful piece of art, subtle but radiant in its whiteness, that can dissolve (if only momentarily) by its uncanny presence among political posters, slogans, and people rushing by, the drama of the financial crisis and shift the perspective from the grim reality of the economic crisis to the imaginary constitution of money.

Photos by Maxime Gyselinck.

Drachma Project http://drachmaproject.tumblr.com/

Drachma Project ASFA Workshop!

Thu, 26 May 2011 08:37:00 -0400

DRACHMA CONJURATION’S WORKSHOP

Athens School of Fine Arts 25-27 may 2011

Come and train to become the moneymakers of tomorrow!

________________________________________________________

PRESENTATION
The workshop is part of a global conspiracy on currencies and all exchange values, which started in April 2011 in Hydra. The drachma conjuration is the ghost of a currency system.

From the 25^th until the 27^th of May, the workshop will be held in the form of 3 ghost ministries, which will work inside the Athens School of Fine Arts under the supervision of NAB - Nikos Arvanitis (Artist, GR/DE), Benoit Durandin (Architect, FR/GR), Georgios Papadopoulos (Economist, GR).

The aim of the workshop is to shape a new system of exchange and its related values. Its goal is to reflect, speculate and contaminate what is commonly called money.

The 3 ghost ministries will be:

Ministry of Light (also called Ministry of Pragmatism) which is in charge of defining the system, its connexions, ways of exchanging and defining values. It is responsible producing organigrams, schemes and all documents needed for the comprehension of the flux, exchanges, etc…

Ministry of Time (also called Ministry of Propaganda or Ministry of Meaning) which is in charge of defining norms, color charts, shapes, all elements related to the new values. It is responsible designing material of propaganda such as posters, symbols, slogans, music, films, games etc…

Ministry of Space (also called Ministry of Materiality or Ministry of Real Estate) which is in charge of defining the architectures and spaces that the new economic system needs and implies, places to store values (if appropriate) and all types of spaces closely related to the new system of exchange, etc…

PROGRAM

First day: Presentation and research of previous existing ghost offices by NAB. Studies of other conspiracy theories ( texts of Popper, but also the Leviathan of Hobbes, Discours de la servitude volontaire de La Boetie, etc…), Utopian movements of the early machinist and capitalist age (Fourier, St Simon, but also Robert Owen, others).

Second day: Participants will split in three groups, each group for one ministry and will start working on their agendas.

Third day: Pursuit of the activities. The participants may change ministries. Ministries will have to collaborate in order to coordinate their views. Pin-up at the end of the day of all drawings, sketches and relevant documents. Each minister will present the work produced to a larger audience.

All participants will be part of the Drachma Conjurations future activities such as publication, exhibition etc.

The official language of the workshop will be the official language of the Empire. Greek slang will be tolerated.

Text: By Nikos Arvanitis and Benoît Durandin.

The Symposium “Drachma; Iconography and Symbolic...

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 15:58:00 -0400

The Symposium “Drachma; Iconography and Symbolic Value” took place at the Historical Archive of the National Bank of Greece on Tuesday the 5th of April 2011. The presentations and the discussion were, we think, very exciting and gave a further push to the project! All the presentations will be translated and published in a special issue of the re-public.gr

Drachma Project Call for Papers to be Published on re-public.gr

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 12:33:00 -0400

Online journal Re-public would like to invite contributions for its upcoming special issue entitled “Drachma; Collective Identity and Symbolic Value”. Relevant submissions could concern the following topics:

The history of the Drachma and how this history relates to the present crisis;

The construction of Greek-ness and its representations, and how such representations are communicated in currency;

An analysis of the self-perceptions and self-representations of Greek-ness before and after the economic collapse of the state;The relation between economic value and its possible representations and how the former is supported by such representations;
The nexus between economic and political community. How does the discourse on identity connects the political with the economic?

The length of the essays should be between 1,500 – 1,800 words.

Please send your contributions in electronic format to

e-mail: languagegames@gmail.com or editors@re-public.gr

DEADLINE 15.09.2011

http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=4148#more-4148

Concept

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 04:25:00 -0500

Our project reflects on how identity, community and value are articulated and represented on the Greek currency, and how these social coordinates play out in a network of economic cohesion. The history of the drachma is intricately connected with the establishment and the development of the Greek state, shaped by the struggle of liberation from Turkey, the hope for self-determination, but also from the heritage of the classical Greek civilization. Our aim is to trace the process of national identity building from the viewpoint provided through the representations in the currency. At the same we are interesting on how economic value and political power are articulated and communicated in currency. These representations yield an opportunity to reflect on the Greek construction of classical antiquity as well as the celebrated allegiance to direct democracy. Furthermore, we would like to consider how issues like history, territoriality and nationality are negotiated and how these elements are related with economy and value. Finally, we would like to speculate on how all these elements would play out today and to suggest an alternative design for the principle of currency, informed by the classical tradition of autonomy. We intend to propose a conceptual and operative production in the context of the Greek reality of social antagonism and financial collapse, anticipating the upcoming challenges and scheming for the future. § In order to understand the iconography of currencies, we should interrogate how this iconography can support the circulation of money and more generally how the representations of monetary value are anchored to the individual and to the collective psyche. There is the necessity that money should signal its affinity to legitimate power and this rapport with power is the foundation of its value and its purchasing power. One can recognize the condensation of value in the markings on notes and coins, and can analyze the metonymic effects of the symbolisms of power that are omnipresent in money. It is no surprise that money is engraved with the most potent and omnipresent symbols of power; the head of the sovereign, the most prominent national symbols and personalities, the geographical area of the state. Alongside such emblems of state sovereignty we often find religious symbols. Such symbols aim to combine secular with religious associations, trying to elevate the profanity of money to a different more sacred plateau. They relate with and manifest the religious character of value, where mystification and fetishism are supporting the ritual of exchange and accumulation. § Each bank note can be broken down to its own visual-textual elements, the analysis of which can be extracted in symbolic and iconographic patterns that are reproduced across time. On the symbolic level, the alphabet, the date, the references names, and titles, express linguistically the identity of the note. On the iconographic level, human figures and space references (landscapes and monuments), as well as secondary ornamental elements, supplement language, establish a pictorial narration communicating the elements of construction of the national identity and economic power. Last, but not least, an assortment of national and corporate emblems, instills the notes with the authority of the state, suggesting direct references to power and nationality. Associative, unconscious relations between sign and referent, based on origins, on culturally specific meaning, and on shared presuppositions about historicity and traditions, create the foundations for the affective investment in the value of the banknotes. The recomposition of all these textual and symbolic signs can facilitate the investigation of the pictorial narration of the Greek currency and the possibility of a general theme. § The topic and the diversity of the questions raised about the Drachma require a multi-disciplinary approach. Economic theory and economic history are necessary for following the drachma along the trajectory of the Greek economy, during the 150 years of its circulation. Design is important in reading the iconography of the Greek currency and in supporting the textual analysis of the representations of value and identity as they are inscribed in coins and banknotes; design can reverse-engineer the production of currency, deconstructing the syntax of money and illuminating the function of each of the pictorial elements separately. Psychoanalysis can uncover the mechanism of affective investment in the pictorial narrative of the currency as well as the possibilities of unconscious associations of the Imagery of the drachma. Finally, art can provide a method of research and articulation that is not constrained by the limits of theory, or even of language; artistic practice provides the means for critique and reflection on the currency that can articulated the theoretical analysis in concrete production. The variety of the approaches and of the participants is an asset for our research as well as a methodological proposal for cultural analysis and critique. § The evolution of the Drachma provides a history of the birth and the development of the Greek state, as it is articulated through the self-representation of national identity and economic power. The participation of Greece in the European Monetary Union and the substitution of the Drachma by the Euro, has terminated this process of national self-representation via the currency. This decade creates a gap in the Greek monetary history. By reflecting on the iconographies of the Drachma today we can make a comment on national-identity and self-perception in a very particular historical juncture. The financial collapse of the Greek state and the deep economic and political crisis has created a context where identity, value and nationality are reconsidered. Currency provides a specific frame of reference for the analysis, constraining theoretical and artistic speculation through the syntax of notes and coins. The Drachma team will try to use these constrains creatively and productively and to suggest a new iconography for a contemporary post-crisis identity.

Events

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 03:34:00 -0500

**** Workshop: The five-day-workshop will be organized in Tompazis Mansion in Hydra, which is run by the Athens School of Fine Arts as a residency space, between the 31st of March and the 4th of April. The idea is to bring together the researchers for five days of reflection, interaction and collaboration. Each participant will present his or her research so far contributing the overall framework of analysis. Cross-pollination of the approaches and the projects will lead to a more coherent approach and help the production.

**** Symposium: The symposium will take place in the Historical Archive of the National Bank of Greece in Athens on the 5th April. It will provide a platform for the presentation of the individual projects as well as of the results of the workshop. At the same time other researchers that are not affiliated to the project but that share some of the methods and the interests of the analysis will present their view on the drachma furthering the breadth of the analysis.

**** Workshop with the Students of the Athens School of Fine Art. A three day workshop with the participation of members of the Drachma Project and the students of the students of the Athens School of Fine Art will be organized under the supervision of Olav Westphalen (tbc) in late April. The results of the workshop will be exhibited in the Exhibition of the Drachma Project in Athens.

**** Exhibition/ Conference/ Publication: The Exhibition of the productions will take place in Athens in autumn. The location of the exhibition is still to be defined. At the same time a a conference and a publication on the Drachma project will be organized.

**** Parallel to the exhibition a series of performances will be curated by Elizabeth Ward.“The Drachma Project lends itself to exploring the creation of collective memory. Performance is durational, time based, and much like the construction of history our memory of a performance condenses time into a feeling or understanding (or confusion) of what took place during a specific time and place. With the drachma and it’s evolution as a base one can work physically with many different aspects: The geometrical designs of the lithography, the iconographic poses of people and objects, and the flow of currencies between people as movement.”

INAUGURATION OF THE DRACHMA PROJECT ON THE 30TH OF...

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 08:08:00 -0400

INAUGURATION OF THE DRACHMA PROJECT ON THE 30TH OF OCTOBER

Dear friends we would like to invite you to the first public presentation of our ongoing research on the Drachma, on the occasion of the MarathonMarathon Project, this Sunday the 31st of October at the Acropolis Museum, in Athens at 16:00. The Drachma Project is a research initiative, involving artists and theorists across disciplines, with an interest in the Greek economic reality and the Greek currency as a symptom of this reality. We are interested in the Drachma not so much as a means of exchange, the Drachma has been replaced by the Euro already for a decade, but more as a symbol of economic value and political power. We believe that these issues are expressed concretely in the imagery of the currency. Ultimately, value is to be judged in terms of the divide between its ‘natural’ image, maybe gold is such an image, and the fate of its ‘artificial’ representation.

Our project reflects on how identity, community and value is articulate and represented in currency, and how these social coordinates play out in a network of economic cohesion. The history of the drachma, is intricately connected with the establishment and the development of the state of Greece, shaped by the struggle of liberation from Turkey, the hope for self-determination, but also from the heritage of the classical Greek civilization. Our aim is to trace the process of national identity building from the viewpoint provided through the representations in the currency. These representations yield an opportunity to reflect on the Greek construction of classical antiquity as well as the celebrated allegiance to direct democracy. Furthermore, we would like to consider how issues like history, territoriality and nationality are negotiated and how these elements are related with economy and value. Finally, we would like to speculate on how all these elements would play out if a new currency would be issued today and to suggest an alternative design for the principle of currency, informed by the Greek cultural tradition of autonomy. This is not so much a proposition of an alternative currency, say to the Euro, but rather a conceptual and operative production in the context of the Greek reality of social antagonism and financial collapse, anticipating the unavoidable failures of the financial architecture.

In order to understand the iconography of currencies, we should interrogate how this iconography can support the circulation of money and more generally how the representations of monetary value are anchored to the individual and to the collective psyche. There is the necessity that money should signal its affinity to legitimate power and this rapport with power is the foundation of its value and its purchasing power. One can recognize the condensation of value in the markings on notes and coins, and can analyze the metonymic effects of the symbolisms of power that are omnipresent in money. It is no surprise that money is engraved with the most potent and omnipresent symbols of power; the head of the sovereign, the most prominent national symbols and personalities, the geographical area of the state. Alongside such emblems of state sovereignty we often find religious symbols. Such symbols aim to combine secular with religious associations, trying to elevate the profanity of money to a different more sacred plateau. They relate with and manifest the religious character of value, where mystification and fetishism are supporting the ritual of exchange and accumulation.

A different, somehow derived, but nonetheless important, dimension of the iconography of currency is that the constitution of a uniform standard of abstract value creates a unified system of exchange and in consequence an economic community. Monetary union signals and at the same time contributes to the emergence of a political community. This economic constitution of political community is not organized on the basis of a single market, but rather on the sovereign right to enact laws and issue currency that creates a homogenous economic area. In that sense it is important for the common currency to communicate not only the power that supports (and sanctions) it but also the homogeneity of the community in the name of which money is issued and used. Money employs representations of national culture and achievement in order to fulfill this integrating function and to signal the necessary cultural cohesion both internally and externally. These representations are the targets for our critical practices and for our theoretical interrogations.