As counterpoints to the dominance of the global capitalist economy, the project group Big Hope have added a new stage to their ongoing project; 'Talking About Economies', by building a large scale game like structure - 'Commonopoly' - a series of boxes, found objects and instruction cards that can be used by people visiting the gallery space. Through engaging with the piece by making brief interactions and contributions that represent symbolically the ideas of various alternative economic systems, participants can expand and sustain the game's content for future players. Whilst some of the ideas modelled take their source from quite specific, small scale economies existing in Berlin, others represent more theoretical approaches, but all are concerned with notions of sustainability and expanding the idea of community.
www.bighope.hu/commonopoly

Big Hope

The project group 'Big Hope' was formed in Budapest in 1998 when visiting Scottish artist, Dominic Hislop and Hungarian artist, Miklós Erhardt found a mutual interest in discussing strategies of engaging with social issues and communicating with a broader public in art. Together they have worked on a
number of collaborative photographic, video and mapping projects often involving certain marginalised social groups, such as homeless in Budapest ('Inside Out' 1998) and immigrants in Torino ('Reroute' 2002), as both project participants and audience*. A key aim of these projects has been the empowerment of participants through self representation. In such projects, the role of the artists has been as facilitators, who set up a framework for dialogue, monitor the process, accommodate new directions then finally
present the results.
Elske Rosenfeld has joined Big Hope for the recent series of exhibitions under the title 'Talking about Economy/ies' that have been exhibited at ICA-Dunaujvaros, Hungary, SparwasserHQ, Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin and to be shown at OK: Offenes Kulturhaus, Linz, Austria in March 2004.
*For documentation of all Big Hope projects: www.bighope.hu