THE TREE OF MONEY

THE TREE OF MONEY
A Shanghai urban tale

In China there is strong oral transmission tradition. There´s a vast record of knowledge transmitted trough local tales with a very easy language but with very strong social, moral and spiritual teachings. This kind of stories were used by Buddhism, in families but also by communism to transmit what they thought were the most important teachings that people should know about life. In this project I use the same format to talk about one of the main topics in nowadays life, specially in China, the meaning of success.

I developed a local research in Shanghai to know different ways of understanding this topic and at the same time I was collecting local personal stories and materials to build a contemporary tale.

With all the materials and information, I made a book that shows my point of view of this topic using cyanotype, an old photographic technic but starting from cellphone photos, a middle point in-between modernity and tradition. With this material I developed a fiction story where different options in life are shown by the characters in an unreal but realistic tale that opens the question: how do we want to spend our time in life?

The photo book