C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me)

Mueve (Galeria )

Pasaje Tello 285, (Esq. Diez Canseco), Miraflores

Opening Sept, 23 2026 at 7:00 pm

Sept 23 - Oct 25

MORE EXHIBITION PHOTOS ON OFLUXOS.NET

With Miguel Aguirre (PER), Priscilla Benyahia (FR), Jimena Chavez Delion (PER),

Emilio Martinez Poppe (USA/PER) and Mykolas Valantinas (LIT). Curated by Elia-Rosa

Guirous-Amasse (FR).

"Il me semble parfois que je n'existe pas vraiment, mais simplement que j'imagine que je suis... que le même être agit et contemple." — André Gide, Les Faux-Monnayeurs

Set in a former bank in Lima, C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me) examines the material forms of global financial power (its bureaucracies, ledgers and currencies) and the counterfeit economies that unsettle its sovereignty. Peru has been named the world’s leading source of counterfeit U.S. dollars for over a decade, and in 2012 the U.S. Secret Service opened a permanent office in Lima. Here, every note that crosses a counter carries an unspoken question: is this the real thing, or its double?

The exhibition is less an investigation into Lima’s counterfeiting trade than an inquiry into the ontological questions that fake money raises. The counterfeit is not the exception to monetary authority but its mirror, a shadow epistemology that exposes how fragile that authority is. If the real and its copy have become indistinguishable, the deeper unrest is not about what is fake, but about why we agreed to believe any of it was real. Like identity in André Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs, currency is not a fixed truth but a performance sustained by agreement. The show draws on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which challenges the myth that money arose from barter and argues that it emerged to enforce debt through the implicit threat of imperial violence. His student, the Guatemalan anthropologist Julio Linares, extends this argument in Decolonizing Money (2026). He calls for the dollar’s abolition and a re-investigation of the systems it displaced, from Mesoamerican cacao to West African cowries, currencies whose value lay in their perishability.

What is the difference between a promise and a lie? Between value and belief? Between the authority that mints currency and the skill that copies it? Five international artists are invited to excavate situated monetary histories, Andean, Kabyle, North American, Baltic, each one revealing a case study in how monetary belief is manufactured, enforced, and occasionally, defiantly, unmade. What protocols of value, what rituals of exchange, what forms of collective decision-making were we forced to forget? The exhibition makes visible that the current financial order was always contingent, always fragile, always held together by force disguised as inevitability. Once that disguise is exposed, there is no going back to innocence. Only the question of what we build in the space where the fiction collapses.

In 20 pounds, Miguel Aguirre reproduces Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire 1:1, rendered in the palette of a twenty-pound note. He hangs it beside a one-tenth-scale version of Tristán e Isolda by the Peruvian artist Tilsa Tsuchiya, whose portrait appears on Peru’s 200-sol note. The juxtaposition exposes art-market and monetary valuation as twin fictions, both arbitrated by institutions with colonial roots. Is Tsuchiya’s work really worth a tenth of Turner’s? Tsuchiya may be the most expensive Peruvian artist ever sold, yet her prices have never passed the million-dollar mark, while Turner and the Western canon routinely set records at auction. Ultimately, the work also questions the mechanisms by which artists and their works are legitimised and turned into national heritage.

In Mémotype 005 & 003, two wax frames hold dancer portraits with copper coins embedded like offerings. A forged painting hangs beside one of them, made by a practicing counterfeiter. Bullish Candlestick is a copper belt hanging on cables—coins punched in Braille reading reads DTSTSTDSTSTSTR…. (which translates to “dum tek slap tek slap tek slap dum roll”), tracing an economic curve readable by touch and sight. Cybernetic Trance transforms the sound of nakh dancers' jewelry into hammer-strikes of coin-forging. Corporeal music becomes a machinic rhythm.

This work draws from the Kabyle counterfeiters of Aït-El-Arba, a Mediterranean village at the North of Algeria, jewelers who retreated to mountain caves during French colonization to strike Napoleonic gold imitations. While the empire destabilized local currency to consolidate control, these craftsmen reversed the gesture: counterfeiting became an act of resistance, despite violent repression. Today the coins survive sewn into wedding dresses and traditional dancers' scarves. Traces of this history can be found in colonial archives, notably Le Monde Illustré (1857).

Jimena Chavez Delion traces the visual grammar of debt in Lima, from loan forms and security grilles to informal lending ads, and recreates the drying and ritual perforation of counterfeit notes. Emilio Martínez Poppe presents a 1:1 photograph of the view from a Philadelphia municipal employee’s office window, paired with an engraved anonymous interview that brings city government to a human scale. Mykolas Valantinas enters the backroom of counterfeit production through the archives of his father, Ritis Valantinas, designer of Lithuania’s first litas after the fall of the USSR, linking forgery to economic sovereignty and destabilization.

Underlying the exhibition is a burning desire to explore collaborative, horizontal and less extractive economic systems. It surfaces most plainly in Polka Dots and..., by Benyahia and Chávez Delion, where chocolate coins exist only to be consumed collectively. The work evokes Bitcoin while rejecting its logic of accumulation, and in its refusal value dissolves through consumption rather than multiplying through scarcity.