As an economic category, hyperinflation is being studied as an extreme, out of control inflation. It is a sign of a severe breakdown in money’s value, provoking distrust in government, requiring day-to-day solutions and generally altering the sense of value, order and authority. As such, hyperinflation is also a subject of social and cultural studies: “Inflation is an integral part of modern culture and intensifies and condenses the experience of modernity in a traumatic way” (Widdig, 2001).
Its factual history can be traced back to the Roman Empire, being one of the contributors of its collapse (Temin, 2006). Phillip Cagan envisaged hyperinflation as an economic problem in The Monetary Dynamics of Hyperinflation (1956), which occurred 55 times in the 20th century. However, the science of economy still offers no exact understanding of hyperinflation, as its fluctuations heavily rely on people’s confidence in government (Tarullo, 2017). Yugoslavia’s hyperinflation of 1992-94 was the last case of such inflation in Europe, with the highest montly rate hitting 313,000,000% (Hanke-Krus, 2012).
Designs of banknotes and coins are never random. They encrypt a cultural state of mind, its psychology, and economy, combined into a singular semiotics of value. It is through hyperinflation that we can observe devaluation and distortion of these values and the overall social, political and cultural shift. Therefore, by entering a visual, symbolic and discursive environment of a post-economic condition, the project aims to examine how much the phenomenon of hyperinflation can be a fertile ground to dig for better understanding of sudden cultural mind-shifts and social reconditioning provoked by new technology.
The research is focusing on Yugoslavia’s hyperinflation of 1992-1994. The survey starts by tracing the origins of Serbian (dinar) banknotes’ design, which was published for the first time in 1884 (Ćirić, 2013), and made on the basis of reserve 100 francs’ banknote cliché, held by the National Bank of Belgium. This is how the creation of the Yugoslav dinar can be considered as an “offspring” of the Latin Monetary Union and its parallel life-story. Some 108 years later, the dinar went through one of the worst hyperinflations ever recorded in history. We are also dealing with logical problems in a visualization of the rate of the cumulative inflation in Yugoslavia during 24 months of hyperinflation, which is 3,6 x 10^22, an abstract value difficult to translate into the experience of life.
IS THERE ANY ROOM FOR BREATHING?
Exhibition text by Ana Ivanović - curator at National Museum of Montenegro in Cetinje
“Fifth manipulation: Inflation is our preeminent danger, and the Central European Bank has only one goal, to oppose inflation at any cost”[1]
In the early 1990s, accelerated changes took place that the majority of the people of the then SFR Yugoslavia did not notice or were aware of, and somehow failed to react, making the collapse more and more certain. That crash happened during the pivotal years of 1992-1994 when a series of traumatic events and experiences befell Yugoslavia, among which was hyperinflation, the severity of which was unprecedented in world history. It was nothing but a consequence of previous processes and phenomena. It is not only a problem within the country and a catastrophically badly managed policy culminating in war and the dissolution of the country, but also broader geopolitical developments. All in the shadow of symptoms of the installation of neoliberal ideology.
The need to devastate and cancel the previous legacy has already gained momentum and we can say that with the restoration of capitalism[2], which began in the former communist countries after 1989, with privatization and the so-called transition to democracy, an atmosphere is established that is perhaps closest to the feeling of breathlessness[3] in which the once unique social fabric begins to split.
In that vacuum where the ordinary citizen loses his step and, at the same time his breath, with the coming changes, the appearance of reproduction occurs, whether it is a photograph, a poster, history, money...it didn’t matter anymore. Everything becomes subject to change and to the establishment of a new given that had no basis in the previous way of life.
It can be said that such transformations of the social environment are actually “the reduction of the country to a ‘plan’ that exists in a void and is not endowed with other qualities. A tabula rasa freed from everything that is unique and resistant to exchange”[4]. In such a situation, a change in the production and presentation of values, as well as their perception necessarily occurs.
The Yugoslav Hyperinflation project by Mladen Bundalo is part of a broader interdisciplinary research that, according to the author, examines the phenomenon of hyperinflation as a cultural process and a psychological event of economic uncertainty. In this sense, artistic practice is used as a tool for understanding different, often sudden cultural changes that occur due to inflationary breaks and economic instability, as well as phenomena concerning changes in the representation of values in the contemporary environment. On the other hand, it is also about examining its positions and potential as a field of meaning within the techno-consumerist culture and economy, its autonomy within these frameworks, as well as how the experience of art can help in changing the view of economic uncertainty.
Starting from the artistic solutions and design of banknotes, the artist observes the distortion of value, where carefully selected iconography is completely emptied of its symbolic meaning during hyperinflation. The characters of famous personalities, which encode a certain state of the cultural mind, become invisible and devalued at the expense of enormous numerical records that in themselves have no real value.
In a broader framework, one can speak of semio-inflation as a special type of inflation that occurs in the field of information, understanding, meaning[5]. Berardi explains it as the need for more signs, words, and information to buy less meaning. It is about the acceleration of the infosphere that goes hand in hand with the logic of neoliberal capitalism and the need for constant acceleration of the flow of capital. In other words, there is no room for the production of meaning outside the context of exchange and circulation.
The place of “general, shared knowledge” is taken by the conceptual manipulations of financial elites. There is a moment when it is decided that inflation can be opposed by reducing labor prices, with the argument that this contributes to competitiveness. All with the aim of explaining that privatization and market competition are guarantors of quality for the work of schools and public services. Delaying the retirement age means opening up more opportunities for youth employment. At the same time, in order to increase employment, taxes on the rich must be reduced.[6]
A semblance of stability has been established for the moment, but the feeling of losing breath due to such humiliations arises again, where the reconsolidation of society and the emergence of new forms of solidarity become more than necessary. However, that did not happen, and grasping at straws became the only option in that time of changes that transformed and shaped the majority of the population in parts of the once unified state. On the other hand, the position of art was more than free to act. It can be seen as a space with enough air in which it is possible to carry out what Berardi calls the poetic reactivation of the general intellect as the only way to free oneself from the oppression of financial capitalism.[7]
The artist, through carefully choreographed personal memories, scientific, economic data and information, unobtrusively, and rather powerfully conceptualized, carried out by artistic process and language, deconstructs the aforementioned power structures. In the space of hopelessness and the need to find stability, value, and security, Mladen Bundalo investigates, and finds those places where there was a ray of change that could make things different so that today we don’t have to talk about the moment when we all lost our breath, but about the possibility to live life to the fullest.
1 Franco “Bifo“ Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Semiotext(e), Intervention series 14, 2012, p. 46.
2 Boris Buden, Transition to Nowhere / Art in History after 1989, Archive Books 2020, 42.
3 Franco “Bifo“ Berardi, Breathing/ Chaos and Poetry, MIT Press, 2018.
4 Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth / Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, Verso, London/New York, 2022, 42,43.
5 Franco “Bifo“ Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Semiotext(e), Intervention series 14, 2012, 96.
6 Ibid, 44-46.
7 Franco “Bifo“ Berardi, Breathing/ Chaos and Poetry, MIT Press, 2018, 9.
