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The 9th November 1989 saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, precipitating a movement of people from East to West Germany and signifying the imminent collapse of the Iron Curtain. The end of this divide between East and West symbolised the failure of a utopian communist ideal and paved the way for the export of Western culture and capitalism to the East. To mark this day, exactly 20 years on, we decided to give up one day of our combined wage as artists in residence in Linz, sending a 50 Euro note down the Danube river in a bottle towards the East. The river, which dissects both Western and Eastern Europe, in the past formed part of the Iron Curtain and today serves as a number of national borders.

Whilst the construction of the Berlin Wall followed the dissolution of Nazi Germany, the bridge from which our bottle set sail was built under Hitler’s guidance at the height of Nazi rule in Austria. Completed in 1940 with granite quarried under brutal conditions in the nearby Mauthausen concentration camp, it is still regarded as a symbol of the economic and cultural rise of Linz during the Nazi period. In 2009 it links the landmark contemporary art spaces of the city, the new Ars Electronica Centre, the Lentos Museum and the Salzamt Atelierhaus on the South bank in which we are living and working; all of which are jewels in the crown of Linz’s cultural “offer” in its year as European Capital of Culture 2009.

As our currency, a unifying but exclusive symbol of the new European order of Neoliberal free trade, is carried Eastwards by the Danube, its value will rise and dip as it passes through peripheral European countries formerly of the Eastern Bloc or communist Yugoslavia, including Hungary, Romania, Serbia and the Ukraine – countries where the minimum wage is still less than half of what we are being paid for our residency (which at 25 Euro each per day equates to less than 3 Euro per hour). Perhaps the money will be washed up and retrieved along the way, perhaps it will find its way to the Black Sea and out to the Western coast of Russia, or perhaps it will sink and be consumed by the waters like our lives in the democratic and post-communist East and West, consumed by money in a tide of capitalism.
Added: 09.11.09

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