PROJECTS

In May'24, First Draft- an arts collective in New Delhi organised Really Really Free Market, a temporary market based on the concept of giving, community building, and sharing resources, for free. It created a temporary, autonomous zone, free in terms of money and value in socio-economic aspects, and also free ideologically, autonomous and ungoverned by regular conventions and norms of capitalist practices and places of commercial exchange. As an experimental, alternative economy the market sought to discover and showcase tangible and intangible objects, values, and localities amongst the landscapes of the participants.

 

At this event, I sold a thought experiment that visitors could buy in exchange for active participation. Sitting in an alternative economy, I sold the idea of tracking the currency of hope. Even though hope may not be conventionally regarded as a transactional commodity, the event made me consider how humans are often and inadvertently selling and buying hope. Across marketers, politicians, educators, doctors, artists and more, one constantly engages in the barter of hope. The hope of a better future. The hope of a better life. The hope of a better world.
 

 

The Experiment

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This experiment invited participants to buy into accounting for the differential meanings, experiences and barter of hope in their day-to-day lives over a month. Herein, we experimented with the idea of buying, saving, investing and spending hope as a currency, within the tangible scope of the given small jar that I sold alongside at the market. Participants could choose as many objects to represent the material currency of hope and would maintain a tracker to keep note of the currency’s increment, expense and weekly balance. 

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The intent of the experiment was not to frown on the capitalist commercialisation of hope, or create a cult for romanticising hope but to become more cognizant of the multiple ways in which it features and works in our personal, economic, political, social and ecological lives. Materialised through an artistic medium, the focus was solely on the mobility of the construct of hope and the consequent ways in which it mobilises us as individuals and societies.