![]() Given the financialisation of everything under a capitalist economics which no longer emphasises the production of goods and services but of speculative economic growth, and where money seems to weirdly ‘mis-measure and misrepresent everything’, it makes sense that the financial market and its relationship to art production (and to social relations in general) has become the new focus of intervention practices such as Valentina’s. This becomes a way to both offer a critical perspective on that system and gain a degree of empowerment or autonomy from it, whether producing your own food or your own speculative investment scheme. Hacking the finance market, venture capitalism and the prospect of Silicon Valley becoming a studio practice were debated, and though no clear resolution emerged we did share around a very good zucchini pasta and still-warm homemade bread.Īs with the earlier projects, Market for Immaterial Value effectively hacks a particular system, trying to understand how its infrastructure works and recreating it on a small, DIY scale. Up for discussion amongst the assembled practitioners and thinkers were alternative ways of valuing non-material artistic labour in the context of affective capitalism. My initial encounter with the Market for Immaterial Value came as a guest at a dinner event, ‘Un-quantifying value’, hosted in mid-2015 by The Institute for Endotic Research, a discursive, interdisciplinary initiative from Lorenzo Sandoval based out of his tiny Berlin kitchen. Not knowing exactly what those structures might look like, the project set out to create various spaces of conversation framed as research, in partnership with collaborators that include anyone who has attended or participated in one of their events. Unwilling to simply buy into the artist-as-entrepreneur mode of staying afloat, but without a backup plan to meet rising rent, Valentina writes of feeling she was somehow inventing a non-existent profession, and so needing to create ‘not only my ‘art’ but all structures around it that could possibly support it and make it work’. On the premise that ‘art cannot be oblivious to its own conditions of creation and exchange’, her current project with partner Pieterjan Grandry, Market for Immaterial Value, is a multilayered platform for investigating the possible role and future(s) of the artist in a world driven by the demands and flows of neoliberal capital, via a collective process of renegotiating ‘value’ and exploring contemporary economics. Some four years later, informed by the pragmatics and precarity of being an ‘unmarketable’ artist in the gentrifying creative capital of Berlin, Valentina’s work has come to address much more directly those immaterial relations and systems of exchange that one needs access to in order to live. ![]() These were architectures involving objects and spaces but also networks of knowledge and ideas. Trained as an architect, Valentina was concerned here with building infrastructures of support -self-made, self-managed, not always fully functional, but open to input, improvement and appropriation by others. The project website, Berlin Farm Lab, announced what was desired most on any given day: flour, rice, oil, and tracked her embodied and collected research over the summer and beyond to become a not insubstantial resource of its own. I swapped some crumbling homemade biscuits for a handful of golden potatoes. To supplement a diet of what would otherwise have been mostly tomatoes and greens, visitors were invited to bring edible offerings to trade for the surplus of what she managed to grow. These were relatively simple techniques and configurations posed as a counterpoint to the dominant ways of feeding oneself in the city. ![]() We first met in 2012 at 30 Days in the Garden, a backyard in one of Berlin’s quieter suburban neighbourhoods where the Greek-born artist had set up a network of experimental devices and scenarios for producing the basic resources and food she needed to live for 30 days, without any waste. Valentina Karga began her practice working with rather concrete ecologies -self-sufficient systems by which she could sustain herself as a human body. ![]()
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