The video shows pages from the essay „The Gift“ (1925) by French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, along with photographs of Korean rearranged and discarded flower gifts called Hwahwans, as well as various designs of plastic leaves, intact and broken, in a way that resembles botanical specimens. The same leaves are used to cover parts of the text, serving as a visual element that evokes associations with shadow plays and ink drawings.
In his essay, Mauss focuses on the ways objects are exchanged between groups in tribal societies to draw conclusions about economies in the industrialized Western world. Instead of regarding a gift as free or altruistic, he demonstrates how gift-giving shapes and determines moral and social contracts. One of Mauss‘s essential concerns lies in the question of what kind of force resides in a certain given thing that obligates the receiver to reciprocate. Although reciprocal rituals of gift-giving have been replaced by currency, various aspects and hybrid forms of exchange still coexist in our modern economies, where commodity relations and gift relations are not always clearly distinguishable.
Actors of Exchange or After Marcel Mauss, The Gift - The Forms and Reasons of Exchange in Archaic Societies can also be presented as a performance.
