Pigs, 2024, bronze, dimension variable
Pigs, 2024
bronze
dimensions variable
Pigs consists of 14 bronze castings of the interiors of piggy banks.
In pre-industrial times, pigs were a central component of the subsistence economy. Pig farming provided the poorer classes with food and thus a certain degree of independence from wage labor—an act of resistance. This role of the pig as unemployment insurance, a companion to acts of resistance, and a means of self-preservation changed with industrialization; pigs increasingly disappeared from the urban landscape—displaced by violent expropriations carried out by the propertied class.
The piggy bank transformed the pig into an object of education and financial planning. But in today’s digital age, the piggy bank has almost completely lost its function. Today, when money is everywhere but cash is disappearing, mechanisms of resistance are harder to identify.
Each bronze thus not only refers to the imagined value of the volume of coins collected inside the piggy bank but also carries a value as a work of art, which is realized in the price of the commodity.
