Conveners
S96. GRAFFITI ON MONEY: CULTURAL PRACTICES FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN TIMES
- Elisabeth Gรผnther (Universitรคt Trier)
Description
Org.: Elisabeth Gรผnther, Susanne Bรถrner; chair: Elisabeth Gรผnther
Coins and banknotes are more than the embodiment of any economyโs circulation and legal regulations. By passing through peopleโs hands, they shape and frame certain audiences. With their specific imagery and legends, they provide distinct messages, depending on the duration and circulation of a given currency. While these features have already attracted scholarly attention, later incisions and secondary writings on money have remained largely unexplored to date.
In our session, we examine graffiti as secondary graphic carvings on coins and banknotes, added later in their life cycles. In contrast to the carefully planned, official messages placed on money, we will investigate graffiti from the perspective of individual reactions to such official money frames. We shall explore the extent to which these graffiti were providing comments on current issues, attempting to spread unofficial/illegal information, express emotions, disagreement with, or re-framing of, certain ideas conveyed by a given numismatic object.
Our underlying hypothesis is that graffiti enable the study of the economic, politico-ideological, semantic, and aesthetic framework of coins and banknotes from a new perspective. Graffiti give insights into epigraphic, linguistic, onomastic, historical, and ethno-sociological aspects, helping to understand them as a testimony of cultural practices and dynamic human-object interactions. While coins and banknotes per se provide specific affordances to stimulate such practices, graffiti complement, corrupt, or even ignore the established official and standardized written/pictorial layout, adding new semantic layers to these innate affordances of money. In this way they offer as well as create new levels of interpretation, depending on the audienceโs knowledge and expectations (โframesโ).
Since graffiti appear in every age and in many different cultural contexts this session is explicitly dedicated to comparing aspects of graffiti on money which transcend cultures, space, and time.
