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Title:	Think of it as Money!: A Solo Project by Adrià Julià
Date:	10/7/2023 - 12/16/2023
Address:	University Art Gallery, 712 Arts Plaza, Irvine, CA 92697
Location:	Irvine, CA
Hours:	12:00pm - 6:00pm
Cost/Cover:	free
Web Page:	https://www.arts.uci.edu/event/adria-julia
Contact Info:	949 824 9854

Details:

Adrià Julià’s large scale installation, Making Money, presents a constellation of artworks, in which the legacy of Hercule Florence—the 19th century French inventor—is the protagonist of a durational dreamscape, one in which money is the shapeshifting medium, bending and stretching through time. From Florence’s attempt to invent a Brazilian banknote—at once reproducible as currency and irreproducible as forgery—we land up in the mid 20th century of Dee Hock’s invention of the Visa card, a precursor to the 21st century derivative driven financial crisis when both the US Dollar and Brazilian Real fell. Along the way, Julià makes a detour through early photography—Florence hand also experimented on a different photographic technique than that of Daguerre and Niepce. The entwined history of money and photography therefore aligns with the history of colonialism, de-colonialism and post-colonialism, all of which is bound up with imperialism’s long history of extractivist practices, the Anthropocene’s origin story. Meanwhile, the fate of “new money” lies in our unforeseeable future, the ‘event horizon’ of which is blockchain and cryptocurrency. Mythologically, crypto has been evangelized by the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk as being immaterial and autonomous, though they very much are not. Witness the dirtiness of crypto mining factories—each bitcoin transaction consumes 1,173 kilowatts—and the fall of Silicon Valley Bank, whose $200 billion in assets was a lifeline to crypto.