By Creative Agents Christophe Berdaguer & Marie Péjus (FR)
Inspired by the concept of Minutos, the french artist duo CBMP contributed with the Time Bank sculpture to Ideal Lab` Empathic Home. The sculpture project was supported by the english manufacturer of the innovative material Concrete Canvas, a with concrete treated fabric which becomes a hard solid structure after having applied water on it. The sculpture is placed now permanently in the center of Dale – in the center of the community, between the old school house and the old commune house. It is a place were people can meet and exchange.
The idea of setting up a time bank is inspired from a famous time store, founded by Josiah Warren in Cincinatti in 1827. Warren was an inventor and an anarchist. He developed the concept of an experimental “labor for labor store“ based on the principle of exchanging working hours, rather than tasks, making all types of labour equal.
A time bank is a meeting point in a public space where working time can be swapped for money called Minutos. It is a progressive, domestic landscape, based on self development and covered with concrete canvas, a flexible cement-impregnated fabric which hardens in contact with air and water. Like a patchwork, the landscape is woven into an organic frame which may extend indefinitely.
The components of the “empathic space“ landscape come from furniture recovered within the community living in the fjord. This space is a hybrid trading landscape, in terms of its model, architecture, furniture…
Exchanging time is not limited to swapping working hours, it also requires participants to redefine and give meaning to their own perception of time and space. This is one of the reasons that the time bank is built with as system of grafting and aggregating elements as a wide variety of experiences and perceptions are shared within the same landscape
Fjaler Minutos
By Research Agent Rainer Rosegger
The use of new means of payment needs a revision of our relationship to the topic of money. Increasingly, people are recognizing that conventional money systems are at the root of recurring economic and social problems.
Today, with a worldwide financial market, these problems occur on a global scale. They have lead to an understanding that fundamentally new solutions would be needed. A whole host of different models have been developed.
One of the most successful concepts in Europe, so far, has been the introduction of regional currencies called ‘Regios’, which function parallel to the Euro, installed to support the regional economy and enhance the creation of social networks. One of the main reasons for stagnation in the present regional currencies is the administration effort: The unpaid organizers, who took on the responsibility to make the system work, get burned out and therefore discontinue their work.
A new model do not need any administration effort: The concept ‘Minuto Cash’, called Minuto, is based on the possibility that everybody can issue his or her own means of payment. Minutos, which are used similarly to cash are a truly decentralized means of payment. Usually people work and get paid for it after that. The name Minutos is based on the minutes of high quality work that are being used as units of payment for the exchange of goods and services.
The Fjaler Minutos is totally inflation free, as an hour is an hour today, tomorrow and in a hundred years from now, the prices for goods and services in Fjaler Minutos will not have to be adjusted, for instance, if the conventional currency should go into hyperinflation. Fjaler Minutos (as the more stable means of payment) would be the equivalent of a higher amount of Euros.
When introducing Fjaler Minuto, a group of people meet. The responsibility can be shared and taken over by any. citizem Resources and needs are discussed publicly in Fjaler Minuto meetings. Every Minuto voucher shows the name and address of the person who issued it, its value, date of issue, the abbreviation of the state, the postal code of the issuer – and its period of validity.
Ideal Lab 