Dissident Banknote Interventions

Abstract

This article analyzes the collective practice of banknote intervention—dissident stamping and scribbling—by focusing on different cases in Brazil (1975) and Chile (1973, 2019). It aims, first, at understanding the role of money from the vantage point of the relation between State and market; and second, at grasping the role of banknote imagery within an ideological State-market apparatus that both visibilizes and invisibilizes the link between economics and politics. By examining banknote interventions, I argue that this dissident practice disturbs and unmasks an invisible foundation of sovereignty while leaving the economic function of money intact. Lastly, it also aims at pushing the boundaries of artistic exceptionalism by inserting Cildo Meireles’s famous banknote interventions into a genealogy that surpasses the realm of art. Approaching Quem matou Herzog? (Who Killed Herzog?, 1975) and Projeto cédula (Banknote Project, 1970–) within this genealogy enables us to see some of the effects of Meireles’s intervention that have been obscured by a reading that locates them exclusively within the realm of art, singularity, and originality.