Money secures domination. Money is anonymous and abstract. Historically, this link between power and quantifiability has changed the world. Money can be accumulated infinitely, unlike commodities or labor services. Money thus made way for injustice on a new scale and continues to secure it today. Anthropologist David Graeber points out that money is trivialised. He shows that the common narrative of the emergence of money as a simplification of barter falls far short. He demonstrates that the invention of money is essentially about financing wars.

In global capital flows, money symbolically carries every previous transaction. It bears traces of wars, arms exports and slavery. All who use money are implicated – even those who benefit only indirectly from global transactions, in the form of art grants and salaries. No one can locate themselves outside of global connections, even if the comfort of living in a rich country obscures those connections. Art is a money-laundering machine: money with a long transaction history is fed into the art system and may come out cleaner. Even in a comparatively well-functioning democracy, arms exports to war zones and art coexist – with the latter providing basic hygiene.

In the project Money Laundering, the artists expose their own entanglement in global capital flows, address their own participation in the perpetuation of global injustice. The project is a symbolic act, 98% desperation and 2% wit. Washing attempts to strip money of its anonymity and remove the patina of oblivion.

Depending on the occasion, new forms and formats are always sought.

The first realization of this idea took place in 2019 in Berlin as a contemporary music theater piece. The ensemble MaNN AUS OBST #5 elaborated an evening in which elements of sound installation, improvised music and post-dramatic theater were assembled into a plaintive-comic-absurd wash factory. Maja and Anton continued that work as Team DETOX and turned Money Laundering into a long-term project. During 2023/24 they carried out 14 consecutive monthly washing cycles in different formats: video snippet, intervention in public space, improvised music concert, online lecture, text publication, basement concert, flash mob, mixed-form performance (movement and sound), side-show to a new music concert, activism in front of a shopping mall, building and performing with networked instrumental setups.

The project currently exists as an on-demand adaptable washing service. At MINU_festival_for_expanded_music we are laundering 30000 DKK. This approximately amounts to 3% of the festival funding, to 100% of our own fee and to 20000% of the price of one festival pass.

MINU_festival_for_expanded_music is a Copenhagen-based festival presenting art on the borders of experimental music and other media. It is a space for oscillating between extremes and charting relationships between art, technology, and contemporary culture.

MINU_festival_for_expanded_music 2026

Money Laundering

Kildevælds Kulturcenter

The artist operates a listening station offering a changing programme of ten tracks: nine classified as New Music and one piece of Muzak. After listening to a track, the listener receives a cash payment. The Muzak track is paid considerably better—approximately ten times as much as any of the others.

The intervention addresses the value of listening to music, the value assigned to different kinds of music, the subsidisation of music, and the influence of money on perception—the a priori conditions of listening.

Johannes Kreidler

Earjobs

The Max M. S. Pedersen Foundation is an attempt to introduce an artificial foundation into the Danish network of arts foundations. However, the grantmaking process differs from that of other foundations, as it is automated and decisions are made randomly.In doing so, the Max M. S. Pedersen Foundation distances itself from any qualitative assessment in relation to the distribution of financial support and embraces the productive and in itself experimental principle of chance. The foundation has no board or committee. Only a Max/MSP patch that, with a combination of Random-, Drunk-, and Decide-objects and the click of a button, determines whether or not a project can be supported. We do not ask for a budget or a specific funding amount.

All we require is:
• the CV of the applicant
• a description of the project in question.

If you are fortunate enough to be awarded a grant, the foundation sends you a portion of its assets: an unscratched scratchcard. The assets of the Max M. S. Pedersen Foundation consist of a quantity of unscratched scratchcards, which in this way stand in for an enormous potential value. Regardless of whether the scratchcard yields a prize, the Max M. S. Pedersen Foundation kindly requests that the recipient use the foundation’s logo in all public press material regarding the project in question. In conjunction with this year’s MINU festival, the foundation hereby opens the call for applications and looks forward to letting Random, Drunk, and Decide "roll the dice"!

Niklas Brandenhoff

Max M. S. Pedersen Fonden

all the money in the world (for Catalina) is a sad girl party-piece that critiques the societal standards of today in relation to status, economy, gender roles and the art-world. It is also inspired by Romanian party culture and the song Șaraiman by Romica Puceanu, to whom the piece is dedicated.

Longer periods of hypersomnia change both the experience of time and the very ontology of memory. Time is no longer continuous, but divided into images, states, and narratives. Memories can take the form of vivid snapshots, or exist in a state between sleep and wakefulness, where it becomes difficult to distinguish dream from reality. In this space between states, a memory can feel as real as something actually experienced.

The mind fills the gaps, creating connections and stories. Absent people can take on a new significance; an image can grow into an entire narrative. The question becomes: what happens to memory when time is no longer experienced as a continuous flow, but as a series of interruptions - moments of waking, sleeping, forgetting and returning?

Virginia Woolf writes in On Being Ill about the way illness alters our perception of others and of the world around us: “For illness often takes on the disguise of love, and plays the same odd tricks, investing certain faces with divinity, setting us to wait, hour after hour, with pricked ears for the creaking of a stair, and wreathing the faces of the absent with a new significance, while the mind concocts a thousand legends and romances about them for which it has neither time nor liberty in health.”

Dot (wake, sleep, forget, return) is commissioned by MINU_festival_for_expanded_music.

all the money in the world.Dot (wake, sleep, forget, return)

Ipso primero and Ipso Lotto lie at the intersection of two series of electroacoustic pieces, Lostery and in ipso tempore. If the piece is presented as part of the series Lostery, it can be either separately played in a concert or played in loop in the place in which the installation is shown.

The title Lostery condenses the words "lost" and "Lottery". Thus it expresses a rather pessimistic state of mind in which what has been brought into play leads most of the time to failure. It accounts for the successive economic, social and political crises that we have been experiencing over many years and for the increasing inequality between people.

The series Lostery questions two structural parameters which have a significant impact on our lives - on the one hand, the gearwheels of the societal machine in which we are immersed and which mostly conditions our destinies, and on the other hand, the notion of chance which plays a part in the path that we will or will not be able to follow. It divides individuals on the side of the more or less lucky or unlucky according to the socio-political and economic system of the country in which they were born, or to the family context they were brought up in (more or less favoured and equalitarian), their life in a country at peace or at war, the greater or lesser freedom of choice given to them, etc.

Ipso primero, Ipso Lotto

This work takes three different places in the woods near where I live in Oslo as its starting point. Four times over a two month period I visited these places. I walked, watched and listened with binaural microphones in my ears and a camera in my hand, capturing the seasonal changes in the landscape at different parts of the day. The composition is then a staging of these sites: a staging of those listening experiences; a retracing of the steps in the recordings, deconstructing the recorded images and sounds and piecing them back together while framing them in new ways.

Partially hidden behind a screen «the listener-composer» and performers are mediated live through cameras and amplification — moving in, out and through the virtual sites, highlighting and articulating parts of the recorded soundscapes through sound processing, foley work and their instruments.

Kildevælds Kulturcenter

Concerts

25. Nov

18:30

MINU_festival_for_expanded_music 2026