Money decides everything, but hardly anyone gets it
If we want, we can change our monetary system” Travel through our map and discover how our monetary system works.
I've never worked on such a special project: with scientist Martijn van der Linden and artist Carlijn Kingma, I mapped out the monetary system. In an animation of the map, which Carlijn has spent 2,000 hours on, you can see which cash flows determine what blossoms and dies in our society.
With skyrocketing inflation and rising interest rates, it's important that people understand our monetary system better. Only then can we organize the economy differently after the upcoming crisis.
As a visual artist, Carlijn Kingma (Zutphen, 1991) is an outsider. She trained as an architect and calls herself a cartographer. In large, impressively detailed black and white drawings, she uses architecture as a storytelling tool. With the metaphorical language of towers and tunnels, bridges and mazes, she visualizes social and political power structures to make them accessible to a large audience. Kingma never does this alone, but always in collaboration with a specialist. For example, she created with historian and journalist Rutger Bregman, author of the bestseller The Most People Good (2019), a map about the history of humanity.