Publication for the collective exhibition A Moeda Viva, curated by Maria do Mar Fazenda shown at Galeria Quadrum from 16 May to 8 September 2024. The curatorial project foregrounds a group of works that reconsider money as a social convention, drawing on Pierre Klossowski’s essay La Monnaie vivante, in tandem with Robert Bresson’s final film L’Argent, itself based on Lev Tolstoy’s short story The Forged Coupon. To deepen this narrative, the publication includes texts by Sara Antónia Matos and Pedro Faro, Filipa Rosário, Maria do Mar Fazenda, and Silvina Rodrigues Lopes, alongside photographic documentation of the exhibition.
“In each one of the works featured we see that the predominance of money in our lives goes beyond the simple dimension of transaction or trade, perhaps because the ‘inventory of everyday life implies the negation of everyday life through dreams, images and symbols even if such a negation presupposes a certain amount of irony towards symbol and imagery.”
– Sara Antónia Matos, Pedro Faro
“The conception of this exhibition project draws from Klossowski’s essay and Bresson’s film — whose reading by Silvina Rodrigues Lopes and Filipa Rosário respectively appear in this catalogue—, as well as a series of works that guided this curatorship.”
– Maria do Mar Fazenda
“From what we understand, this means that the living currency would put an end to the condition of movie star, through the violent reduction of their bodies to organic forces that produce emotion, to inhabitants of a space where the value would be arbitrarily determined by the right of the fittest. Both types of situations, one close to reality, the other envisioned as a parody, are based on the supposition that everything can be exchanged. This supposition stems from the conception of a closed economic circle that can be unfolded but will not stop intending to integrate what does not belong to the order of production or exchange”
– Silvina Rodrigues Lopes
“One of the main figures of French cinema, Robert Bresson made his last film in 1983, rather economically entitled L’argent. Assertive, raw, prodigious and formally rigid, it examines the symbolic role of money in contemporary society, exposing it as a higher order of extraordinary magnitude to which human beings connect as they connected to the sacred in the past.”
– Filipa Rosário