The Two Sides of the Same coin

Metal Conjunctions

On a spring afternoon in October 1979, artist Víctor Hugo Codocedo carried out his performance Monocle with a $10 coin in front of the Government Palace. Holding that copper circle between his fingers and eyes, he played with posing at various angles for the camera lens, testing different levels of focus and blur of the Angel of Liberty, minted during the dictatorship as a symbol of liberation from the “Marxist regime.” Through this act, Codocedo gazed across the street, turning his back to the presidential palace, and used the rigidity of a coin as a veil, interposing his presence and that of those who now observe the resulting photographs.

This is just one example among many of the varied uses and appropriations of coins: works of art over decades, acts of citizen protest during Chile’s social unrest, “gay money” from 1980s America—just a blink of history. Coins, always at hand and in motion, bear the weight of the artistic, political, and everyday circuits they traverse. Their surfaces are touched, turned multi-use, and transformed.

The works of Milena Moena and Cristian Inostroza, presented in the exhibition Two Sides of the Same Coin at Departamento Jota, also sweep and blur boundaries. They go beyond material friction, delving into the forms, inscriptions, and fits that make up the structure of Chile’s current $100 coin. Their pieces activate images and meanings scattered over time. The coldness of copper, nickel, aluminum, and zinc—elements forming the coin’s core and ring—carries a history of interventions. Its habitual circulation intermingles with art, social contingencies, and political activism.

While other coins have been scratched, shot, split, or held between tongue and palate, those in this exhibition stand marked by the erosion and erasure rendered by Cristian Inostroza and Milena Moena. Instead of adding material layers, they choose to corrode the original structure, stripping away the definitive value of the $100 coin. This design, minted since 2001, was described by then-president Ricardo Lagos Escobar as an effort to “advance reconciliation with all ethnicities and sectors.” Yet, this ambition contrasts starkly with the anonymity of the coin’s image: an unnamed woman typified under the label Mapuche.

Questions arise: Whose eyes are these, reproduced for over twenty years, that still watch us? What distance lies between this anonymous woman and her now-vacant space?

For years, Milena Moena has worn down coins, diversifying their metallic surfaces, expanding their reflections before the viewer confronted with an absent image. Cristian Inostroza has separated countless rings and cores, detaching the image from the inscriptions “Republic of Chile” and “Indigenous Peoples” etched along the $100 coin’s edge.

We rarely notice abundance, much less if it serves a practical function. The pieces gathered here abandon functionality, showing another side of the same coin—one we once absentmindedly fingered in our pockets, spun on its axis, or tossed in the air to predict its fall. The erasure of inscriptions and disassembly of the once-familiar $100 coin return the gaze, splintering the neutrality of its surface.

Absence sets the tone for a new possible structure. Circular forms emancipated from their past and remnants of vibrant pigments solidify into new complexities: headbands, contemporary jewelry, compositions of bifurcated pieces, references to past artists, serigraphs reproducing the original design, and more—a range of possibilities for expression and interpretation (this is just one path we’ve begun to explore).

We are all the accumulation of what we’ve touched—willingly or by force, drawn in or contaminated—aren’t we? asks the protagonist of Guadalupe Santa Cruz’s The Contagion (1997), recounting how her mother made her wash her hands after handling coins or bills. Every day, countless anonymous hands manipulate metallic money.

Whenever we pick up a coin, we sweep through hundreds of hands that once held it. Our fingers leave behind cells destined for others. Likely, no other tangible object circulates as widely as a coin. Part of that current halts here, in these works. Their mineral alloys condense anonymous transits over time.

Ultimately, the question of touch emerges: handling a coin is feeling traces of other hands. Handling a coin inscribes a new layer of its bearer every day while dissolving fragments of its previous exchanges. Each piece attends different metal conjunctions.

— Vania Montgomery.