The Vanishing Table

HD Video, CGI, 14'13", 2014

A group of numismatics is gathered around a large wooden table. Carefully they are studying twenty incredibly rare historical coins. The coins are not visible. Existing only as imagined objects, delicately passed from one careful touch to the other, the coins form a collective fantasy between the numismatics. The session around the oval table almost resembles the rituals of a spiritualistic séance - the table functioning as mediating relay between the individual coin collectors.

Somewhere else, a monkey in a suit is reciting a Lewis Caroll poem from a stockbroker office. The flat tablet-like animated monkey narrates the story of a debtor and a creditor. In the tragic and humorous poem, the debtor is never actually given the sum of his loan before the creditor shows up to collect his dues. The monkey delivers the peculiar story, of an abstract debt-economy no longer founded in actual currency, with a cultivated calmness only shortly interrupted by an agitated conversation on his smart phone.

The Vanishing Table posits the relationship between the physical appreciations of currency as object - even as leftover in the imaginary - and the collective experience of an abstract debt-economy detached from actual existing capital.

Credits

DP: Adam Jandrup

Animation: Zdenko Oliver Santini

Assistant: Julie Nymann

Graphic Design: Tina Helen

 

The Numismatics: Michael Fornitz, Michael Ibsen, Henrik Berndt, Kurt Guldborg, Brian Lohmann

Monkey in a Suit: Ian Burns

 

Thanks: Klassik Design, Bruun Rasmussen, Gentofte Hovedbibliotek, Post Brothers

Supported By: Danish Arts Council, Ida og Ragnvald Blix’ Fond, Tranen - Space for contemporary art