Capitalism May Not be pretty, but it sure is comfy when you are sitting on top.

It may have been one of the last things to be conceived not to mention built for the project but as a comedy piece with a purpose it has a special place in our hearts. The piece itself is made out of a unneeded canvas cabana roof from Viareggio, the elastic cords from said canvas to give the bag its shape and the bag is stuffed full of a very beautiful foam mattress that was found outside of the university. To the tie the bag off we found a bright orange rope and discovered that a hangman’s noose is perhaps a little easier to tie than it should be.

The symbol on the side of the bag is called a SEL and it is the stylized combination of the dollar, euro and pound ($,€,£). Though capitalism has found its way into lives and economies of nearly every "civilized" country in the world, these currencies stand out in my mind as the flagship currencies of capitalism. As a satiric piece presented by an American to a series of Europeans (including the UK of course), we also felt it was important to treat all currencies in an equally ironic light.

Representing capitalism is easy enough symbolically: Throw some recogniseable monetary symbol into the mix of a political discussion and it will be recognized. When we decided to make it a money bag, we were already happy with it but the bag itself has a special background...
This is an aerial view of Viareggio, a small resort town on the Tuscan coast and the former home of the bag before it’s functional reassignment:


The dots that can be observed on beach are an endless array of rental umbrellas and canvas draped structures from private beaches. For the low price of around 40 euro per day you can rent a few square meters of sand, a couple of chairs and an umbrella to keep you out of the sun you supposedly came to the beach to enjoy. It is not that this particular business practice actually bothers me much. It’s perfectly fine to offer the opportunity to rent out an umbrella and some chairs but what you see in this picture stretches on for long, long stretches of beach. The infamous private beaches extend for some 27km along the coast, usually advertised by huge, ridiculous entry gates shouting the name across the sidewalk. Each of them has its own little resort land with restaurant, cabanas, swimming pool (if posh enough).. and then, somewhere beyond all that welcoming clutter, there are forests of deck chairs and umbrellas whose colors are matching those of the restaurant roof, cabana doors, etc. Only then can you see something that looks like sand and, maybe, possibly something resembling the sea. When we arrived in Viareggio and attempted to walk down to the coast, we ran into a solid wall of gates preventing us from even reaching the water for something like 3 km, where we finally found a small passageway squeezed between two cabana jungles that we probably weren’t even supposed to walk on. Upon arriving at the sea and looking back up at the strange, flat horizontal rainbow before us, I thought that this was perhaps one of the ugliest manifestations of the “money before everything else” attitude that I had ever seen. After acquiring the canvas that one of the beach structures was wearing and that was now destined to become (very appropriately) the shell of our art project, I left with a single thought in my head; Captilaism needs to be made fun of as much as possible so that people don’t take it as seriously as this insane tourist trap does.

There is nothing more comfortable in life than a bag of money. Like this chair, money can take all kinds of shapes to suit whatever needs you may have. It is the ultimate tool and according to many people, including those who have it and those who don’t, the ultimate measure of a man. Many of the problems faced in this world can be bought away just as many a desire can be purchased. Yet, money like all things has its limitations. The number of desires that money is able to fulfill and the problems it can easily solve is some number approaching infinity but - and this is something to consider - rich or poor you are presented every day with an infinite number of possible choices. But just because you have an infinite number of choices doesn’t mean that you can do anything you want.