Conceived following a conversation with Israeli artist Nir Harel, Miri Segal’s The New 25 (2019) continues her desire to decode systems of meaning in order to flip them and charge them with subtle autobiographical elements. Segal proposes a new currency, which literally consists of half of a 50-euro banknote. The artist invites people to tear banknotes and start using the two halves for the value they would have had “pre-Nixon Shock”, or as if the banknote were a piece of gold. If you cut a 50-euro banknote in two, you could use it to pay as if it were a 25-euro banknote (which of course doesn’t actually exist). In addition to this semi-illegal act, which is conceived, like bitcoin, as a peer-to-peer economy, the artist refers to the word ‘crisis’, both in the sense of a so-called ‘midlife crisis’, and in terms of ‘financial crisis’.

Text: Lucie Fontaine