Colors 73 - Money

Treviso, March 2008. We hold it in our hand, drop it into someone else's or stuff it in our pockets. We spend more time with it than we realize, yet we treat it like a stranger. We can't do without it, but we never stop to ask ourselves what it means, where it comes from or where it's going.

Colors 73 looks at money, life’s most coveted companion, in its myriad forms. Passing through the hands of millions, money retains traces of the activities - both noble and scandalous - of those who touched it.

Colors had cash taken out of circulation and tested in a lab for telltale substances. The findings form the basis of the magazine, which explores the relationships – both abstract and literal – each substance brings up.

Interviews with internationally renowned economists appear throughout the magazine, with discussions of everything from formal monetary systems to the rest of the world: non-conventional economies and money as a tool for development and social change.

Efigenia's treasure, for example, is a mountain of carefully sorted rubbish. A resident of Curitiba, Brazil, Efigenia trades her trash for food through the city’s Green Exchange program. She has become quite an entrepreneur in the ‘trash money’ business. Meanwhile in Baghdad, rivers of lost blood are traded underground for cash - US$3,500 was the black market price Sayef paid for his son's transfusions.

If, however, your problem is where to put your money, consider the solutions of Gomam, Mir, Yole and Yaghot? Alarmed when the Soviet Union collapsed, these folk filled their mouths with gold teeth. Who knows, they could be useful one day. In Kenya, formal banking is rare so gold is not needed – electronic money is stored and exchanged using a new text messaging service.

From blood, metal, ash and oil to cocaine, soil, skin and silicon, Colors' journey through the substance of money concludes with the sweat of those working to repay a microcredit loan.

The “golden pages”, Colors' mini encyclopedia, explains the curious facts, from how much gold exists on earth to the profits of war, oil and drugs.

Colors 73 – Money
On sale in three bilingual editions – English with Italian, French or Spanish.

http://www.colorsmagazine.com/money/

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