Teios The Mill Of Blood

This project expands Antonio Vega Macotela’s long-term research into exhaustion as an operation of scarcity and wealth, as well as it sets out an inquiry into the way value is produced within the complex set of interdependent relations that make up our global economy. The existence of “mills of blood” can be traced back to IV A .c in Grece This kind of machine was an apparatus used in places where neither wind nor water were available as means of production, and only labor could be used as source of energy. There were three of these kind of mills in Latin America, all three were used to make silver coins during the Spanish colony. There was one in Mexico, one in Peru and one in Bolivia. The MoB presented at dOCUMENTA 14 in Kassel is a reproduction of the Bolivian MoB. During the 100 days that dOCUMENTA 14 will run in Kassel the MoB will produce as many teios as the audience manages, out of a limited of 30,000 planchets. Each of this teios will in turn mine a crypto-teio. At the closing of dOCUMENTA 14 the production of these coins will stop and there will be no possibility to produce more teios, nor crypto-teios. The MoB will be destroyed. All of the teios produced will be collected, certified and deposited in a safe. From the third week of dOCUMENTA 14 in Kassel, an ICO (Initial coin offer) will be launched. This will signal the pre-sale of the digital coin, the crypto-teios. Whatever the ICO manages to raise will be used for the financing of the project. Through a workshop/seminar in Mexico City with various stakeholders involved in the process of conceptualization of the MoB —including Antonio Vega Macotela—, an imaginative debate on how the MoB could/should make visible ways through which the agency of the participants may allow an intervention to escape the perpetuation of the normalization of the nodes addressed by the MoB.