Path of Money

Performing the socio-economy in China

Try-out phase (China) May 2008
Main project phase (China) in May/June 2009

Daniel Aschwanden and Peter Stamer, two performers from Austria, will chase a 100 yuan bill through China, tracking it down with the help of a GPS device and with their own bodies. For four weeks in 2009, they accompany the temporary owners of an electronically marked bill, staying as close to it as possible, under the owners’ drawers, in their houses, in the streets. Since the bill goes from one hand to another, fueling the owners’ dreams of prosperity, the bill crosses bodies and their discourses, social identities, individual emotions, economic fates, tales of beings. By this, chasing the money becomes a means to meet people and their individual stories; it takes on a different kind of (face) value: where and, more importantly, who are the people using it?

Between May 13th and 31st, 2008, Aschwanden’s and Stamer’s professional trajectory leads them for the fourth time to China. In this period, they will realize a first try-out of the project in Beijing and Shanghai, which is to be presented in a series of lecture performances during their stay. Their findings in 2008 enable them to fine tune and fuel their concept of The Path of Money for several artistic facettes and approaches in the next two years. In June 2009 and October 2009, they plan to realize two interventions of Path of Money in China, to be followed by a thorough phase of research in Austria and Switzerland in the same year (November 2009). The outcome will then be fed into the artistic development of a performative installation that is to be premiered in Switzerland in the winter of 2010 and then, to conclude, presented in China in spring 2010.