As part of W139's exhibition, Dead Skin Cash, six artists are invited to react to the prompt "Who can afford to not sell their own skin"" by curating a playlist of visual and audio materials for this weekly screening program.

Mariana Charrua is a ______tourist, artist_________ from Portugal.

Her work manifests in different forms – from paintings or objects to drawings or performances, or some form in between all of those. Charrua adopts an attitude of equalizing things, not taking them as sacred but giving them a symbolic charge.

The result: nonsense images that point to daily situations and characters (animals) or basic life needs: food or love; provocations that raise questions, not answers. A theatrical, grotesque and humoristic tone that creates a narrative and deconstructs the idea of elegance.

The image that presents this program is a collage between an internet image and a photo from her previous collaborative performance I AM A COLUMN, a play where the performers act as columns, stand for relationships dynamics and play with norms.

Instagram: @___l0la_____

Dead Skin Cash is an exhibition by Ghita Skali and Salim Bayri which takes dead skin as its starting point to zoom in on the ambiguities within our relationship to flaking epidermis - the tensions between its acceptance and rejection (some keep it, some scrub it away), its proximity and our neglect, our indifference and its unstoppable production, our obsession and care but disgust once it leaves the body.

Offering €20 per gram, dead skin collection networks emerged through gossip, online advertisements, business cards, and stickers distributed around the city repeating the slogan “get money for your dead skin”. A naive attempt to create a new kind of currency while simultaneously diverting and redistributing public money to people who took the bait out of curiosity, necessity, or entertainment. Within this context, an intimate and immediate material such as skin becomes a possible commodity. How dirty can money be?

What happens when a value is set on something we expel from our bodies? When there is the possibility of getting a reward for something that is usually discarded, dilemmas arise between economic interests, integrity, ethics, labour, and exploitation—echoing the metaphor of 'selling your own skin'. Despite this enticing offer, some people had no interest in this exchange, provoking the question “who can afford not to sell their own skin?”.