Grexit was produced during the Vilém Flusser Residency Programme for Artistic Research 2012.

Grexit, a combination of the words Greece and exit, is a term coined to describe the possibility of departure (voluntary or not) of the country from the EMU and the consequent financial panic. We decided to use this world as the title of the publication, both as a provocation and as a signal, of the motivation of our analysis. The task we set for ourselves is not so much to evaluate the economic and social consequences of a possible disengagement of Greece from the European Union, but to speculate on the unconscious attachment to money, predominantly to the Drachma, but latently also to the Euro. Grexit focuses on currency asking economic as well as ontological, social, and aesthetic questions that address money a as a cultural object, a mirror-image of the European Projects. Grexit explains how identity, community and value are articulated and represented on currency, and how these social coordinates play out in a network of economic cohesion. Currency can be read like a text and the text constructs the narrative of the fetish. The analysis of the signs – both iconographic and symbolic – that define currency creates the syntactic context, where the issues of economic value and collective identity are represented. Each coin or banknote 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 historically. The recomposition of all these textual and symbolic signs facilitates the investigation of the pictorial narrative of the currency and the interpretation of the imagery of value.

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