Moneywork, care, and collective imagination at an artistic festival. An ethnographic account of world-makings within and across communities

The paper presents the case study of a digital complementary currency, Santacoin (SC), co-designed, implemented and deployed at a 10-day performing art festival in Italy. SC allowed participants to create a parallel economy within the blurring boundaries of the festival. As such, the case study constitutes a sort of 'serious game live', as it was enacted in the wild but real money was at stake. The intervention was conducted through a team ethnography which analysed the engagement of festival attendants, artists and staff with the system and the artistic intervention at its root. Indeed, SC was conceived as the core of a performance involving a group of local wellbeing professionals who provided their services in the public space. This was thought as a radical and experimental performative action for leading people to imagine new forms of social production and reproduction within an alternative world, a 'citadel' where finance could be thematised and sociopolitical imaginaries practiced. It was a localised experiment in community building and collective imagination around issues of inequality and social re/production. The paper provides an ethnographic account of the collaborative intervention and its main results. In doing so, it reflects on two main dimensions: the intersection of 'moneywork' and caring practices as explicitly thematised in the public space, and the role social interaction, relationships and communities play in collective imagination experimentations.