A Kind of Exchange

Edgar Villaneuva invites us to ask more of money and exchange, for ‘money is a proxy for the sweat we spent on growing food, sewing clothes, assembling electronics, coding apps, creating entertainment, researching and developing innovations, etc.’ As a proxy figuring as a ‘stand-in for materials … services … responsibility’, Villaneuva draws from David Graeber, that money is ‘the measure of one’s trust in other human beings.’ He continues, but we ‘have used money wrongfully … made money more important than human life … allowed it to divide us … we forget that we humans made money out of thin air. When money becomes the air through its destruction, as in the dust that becomes through interaction with the air, we breathe money; inhaling polypropylene plastic film, ink, metallic foil, and holograms. Like a snake eating its own tail, we become ourselves. Making ourselves out of thin air. Exchange then is a proxy for connection; forms of being in relation to one another. Exchanges are not only transacted in a bank, but processes to be wrestled with and through which ideas, stories, values, and experiences circulate between people, form and material practice and culture; the bank, as both an historical institution of stability and exploitation (materially and speculatively) and as a site commonly associated with logics of value, wealth, exchange, (money and capital) is a curious place to think about money and exchange as a practice of breathing and dialogue with contemporary material culture, in kind.

Work presented in the exhibition connects the use of waste, reformed, and locally-sourced materials in a range of design practice as critical and generative, with architectural and decorative histories of the square mile, and critically alternative models and illustrations of currency distribution, dynamic, mapping and circulation.

This special exhibition as part of this year’s London Design Festival (17-20 September 2026) takes place at the Bank of England Museum. Head of Museum, Saskia Boersma, has invited us to bring together a group of practitioners working experimentally and critically with materials in contemporary studio practice. Adam Knight, Blake Carlson-Joshua, Claire Darwent and Titus Davies, Julian Leedham, Martha McGuinn, Megha Ralapati, Micallea Pedros, Ndidi Ekubia, Nina Tolstrup and Jack Mama, Sam Jacob contribute works that engage with themes of material culture, exchange, commerce, colonial histories, and the Bank of England’s own archival narratives, including reflections on value, circulation, and transformation. Each practitioner has the rare opportunity to work directly with the Bank of England’s waste banknotes (shredded polymer and paper).