Monopoly

The work approaches playfully the origins of the global economic crisis of 2008, as well as the nature of contemporary economy, by referencing the notion of the financial bubble and the immateriality of money. At the same time, the work alludes to the "unnatural" relationship between the economy and our natural environment – the disregard for it, which becomes a form of hubris. In the installation, the future of all the translucent balloons that have been tied to the cacti will, inevitably, be the same: sooner or later, the helium gas that keeps them in the air will escape and all of them will eventually burst by touching the cacti that hold them on the ground. That is the moment when their content will be fully revealed: fake bank notes originating from the famous Monopoly board game. The risk taken through the action of tying the balloons on the cacti is not, in effect, a risk; it is an action that can only lead to a single event: a violent burst. Quite evidently, then, there is great arrogance involved in the action of tying the balloons to the cacti, analogous, perhaps, to the one exhibited by the advocates of the extreme market practices that initiated the crisis of 2008, as well as crises that both precede it and go beyond it – most notably, climate crisis. This attitude has been a global phenomenon that, like the cacti originating from around the world, has left no country or region unaffected in one way or another. As the members of the audience move between the cacti and the balloons, they are invited to reflect on this reality and protect themselves from its ideological pervasiveness, similar to the way they avoid coming into contact with the dangerous spines of the plants. In the end, something alive (the cacti) destroys something artificial (the translucent balloons containing the fake notes). In other words, there is a natural order of things that should always be considered. Every action generates a reaction.