Exhibition at Julio Artist-run Space, Paris, July 2024

Text by Sylvie Fortin

On Disaster, Oracles, and other Common Currencies

Five framed “collages” occupy a wall, forming a triple bottom pattern. For stock market traders, this pattern signals a bullish reversal that follows a downtrend. The pattern, like its triple top twin, is a sort of oracle—an early indicator of trend reversals. As such, Esteban Álvarez’s simple installation is perfectly pitched to the selection of works from his ongoing series More Money Made with Money, begun in 2016.

These works disrupt, if not scramble, easy categories. Each is both unique and made from multiples—Argentine banknotes. Each work is simultaneously here and part of fluid, far-flung, and untraceable exchanges. It is arrested by a frame and buoyed by everyday circulation and global processes of economic valuation. Each is constituted by violence and repair. In this, the series condenses the valences of currency.

These works come out of Álvarez’s studio practice of collage: collecting and altering common print materials. Each work is composed of tiny slivers of many Argentine banknotes of the same denomination, taped together to reconstitute the note whole. Here, each sliver operates as an index. After cutting out a sliver, Álvarez carefully tapes the banknote back with invisible tape so that the amputation is barely perceptible and puts it back in circulation. This expands the parameters of the work far beyond the framed collage, subjecting it to a sort of inflation that is very much in keeping with the Argentine economy. Confronted with disaster capitalism, which devalues currency at will, Álvarez symbolically, if not alchemically, revalues the banknote by destroying and repairing it, and expanding its circulation. His bills (framed and free) are reconstituted, much like juices made from “concentrate.” He gives us a surfeit of counterfeit, a blueprint of revenge economy. I keep one in my wallet, a talisman of sorts against the terror of finance and a reminder that resistance is necessarily stealth and shared.

On the adjoining wall, a brass plate and its reverse print from From the Recicled to Desintegration (2023/2024) extend this exploration. In Argentina, it is not infrequent for fixtures such as door handles, mail slots, door knocks, and intercom plates made of valuable metals to disappear and be sold for scraps. Aimed at survival and tinged with revenge, this direct action redraws notions of property and the commons. It is a performative practice of wealth redistribution that also gives form to new intimacies by taking aim at specific confluences. Handles, slots, knocks, and intercoms all connect the home and the city, they are nodes where flesh meets the world. Covid has even granted them a new status—high-touch surfaces—promiscuous interfaces to be religiously disinfected.

Between these two series, a QR-code grants visitors access to Álvarez’s video Economical Project for a More Equitable Ecology (2009), the hilarious pseudo-documentary of a failed environmental-reclamation art project in which the artist plays all the roles. Like the other two series on view, this video enlists circulation and circularity as critique. Here, national pride, disaster tourism, economic development, environmental justice, and the lure of return on investment produce a potent cocktail—the intoxication that drives post-neoliberalism.

Sylvie Fortin

Sylvie Fortin is an interdependent curator, researcher, writer, and editor based between Montréal, New York, and Buenos Aires. She lectures internationally and her critical essays and reviews have been published in numerous catalogues, anthologies, and periodicals, including Artforum International, ART PAPERS, Art Press, C Magazine, E-flux, Flash Art, and Frieze.

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