Jill Magid
United States | 2021 | 33 min
World premiere
Language : no dialogue
Subtitle : French
In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, the American artist Jill Magid interceded in the national economy by minting 120,000 new pennies, their edges engraved with this phrase: “the body was already so fragile”. The pennies gradually scatter across the five boroughs of New York, as the virus spreads
In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, the American artist Jill Magid interceded in the American economy by minting 120,000 new pennies, whose edge she had stamped with the following phrase: “The body was already so fragile”. An allusion to the physical body and the body politic, which were intimately bound during the epidemic. These pennies represent a sum of $1,200 – the amount of the stimulus check given to individuals during the pandemic. These coins gradually circulate in the five major neighbourhoods of New York.
In this brilliantly made thriller, the rolls move from armoured vans to small shops. This ‘small change’ is exchanged between ‘small hands,’ thus naturally spreading the virus. Jill Magid’s artistic intervention takes the opposite stance of the American government’s ‘war’ against an ‘invisible enemy,’ placing the vulnerability of the people back at the heart of the debate, in a country in which the struggle to have human life recognised as having value is constant.
Aurélien Marsais
2018, The Proposal
