COUNTERVALUE is a hybrid work operating at the intersection of documentary photography, digital manipulation, and generative techniques assisted by artificial intelligence. The starting point is the scanned image of an authentic 5-euro banknote, whose printed architecture—a fictional and generic representation, deliberately unanchored from any specific geographic or national reference—becomes the structural axis of a critical intervention.
Through a strategy of visual détournement, the architectural imaginary of the banknote is deconstructed and digitally reconfigured to generate a ruinous topography—a landscape of collapse that subverts the semiotics of financial stability. This alteration does not erase the original visual grammar of the note but rather expands it, extending its lines to construct a narrative of structural failure. The banknote thus becomes a speculative field in which the promise of value turns into symbolic ruin.
The piece preserves the illusory materiality of the banknote while superimposing a critical dimension that destabilizes its ideological function. The structural fragility of capital is revealed, along with its reliance on an architectural fiction that conceals the dynamics of exclusion, dispossession, and disappearance. In this sense, COUNTERVALUE situates itself within a genealogy of practices that challenge the iconography of economic power through visual displacement, offering a poetic and political re-reading of the contemporary monetary device.