WHEN MONEY STOPS BEING MONEY
Money spends most of its life moving.
It circulates through salaries, markets, banks, and debts. It changes hands thousands of times, rarely pausing long enough for anyone to look at it as an object.
But every bill eventually reaches the end of that life.
When currency becomes too worn to circulate, it is removed by government institutions and destroyed. The bills are shredded in large quantities and officially taken out of the economic system. At that moment, something strange happens.
The object remains.
But the value disappears.
The fragments I work with come from that moment — the point at which money stops being money.
The shredded currency I obtain has already passed through the full cycle of economic authority: printed by the state, trusted by society, circulated through countless exchanges, and finally invalidated and destroyed.
What remains is a residue of the system that once gave it meaning.
These fragments become the raw material of my work.
I collect them, sort them, and slowly rebuild them into dense structures. Thousands of pieces are layered and compressed into forms that begin to resemble urban systems — grids, corridors, towers, intersections.
At first glance the works may look like cities seen from above or streets rising vertically into space.
But they are not representations of cities.
They are constructions made from the physical remains of value.
Currency is one of the most powerful symbols in modern society. Entire economies function because we collectively agree that these printed fragments represent labor, authority, stability, and trust.
Yet when the state destroys the bill, that agreement dissolves instantly.
The material survives.
The meaning collapses.
The meaning collapses.
This is the tension that interests me.
By rebuilding structures from destroyed currency, the work exposes the fragile architecture behind systems of value. What once circulated as economic power returns as physical matter — fragments that can be reorganized, layered, and shaped into new forms.
The work is not about money as wealth.
It is about money as belief.
What we call value is often invisible: agreements, institutions, trust, authority. Currency simply makes those invisible systems visible for a moment.
When that symbol is destroyed, the system it represented becomes easier to see.
My work begins at that point — where economic meaning ends and material memory begins.
The fragments no longer function as money.
But they still carry the structure of the system that produced them.
And that structure is what I build with.