As part of the exhibition Aarhus Er #1 at Kunsthal Aarhus, I have set up a small, temporary experiment in collaboration with the museum shop. It’s a parallel system of exchange based not on money, but on bartering—where visitors can offer something of their own in return for a spray can, a book, a mixtape, or another item from the show.

It’s not a full alternative economy. There are still limits, both practical and institutional. Some things still require regular payment, and there are only a few of each item available. I’m not sure yet whether anyone has taken up the invitation. But the gesture felt timely. The exhibition asks what kind of world might be hidden inside the one we already live in. The shop experiment is a modest attempt to rehearse one small part of such a world: a different approach to value.

There’s no set rule for what counts as a fair trade. The idea is to treat the exchange as a conversation. A jar of homemade jam, a drawing, a few hours of help—these might be as meaningful as cash, depending on the context. Sometimes the exchange is symbolic. Sometimes more material. It depends on what’s offered and how it’s offered.

In that sense, the system is less about efficiency and more about interpretation. It’s a kind of informal role-play, where the visitor and the staff try out a small “what if”: What if value wasn’t fixed? What if you could offer something other than money? What if the shop was a place for reflection as much as transaction?

We have agreed that things made by hand often carry more weight— because they show time and care, or because they’re more personal. A mixtape, a craft, a piece of writing often spark longer conversations. But there’s no fixed hierarchy. Each offer is considered on its own terms.

The people behind the counter play an important role here. It’s their openness and attentiveness that makes the system possible. They listen, ask questions, and interpret. It’s not always easy, and there’s no manual. But that’s part of the point: it’s an improvised system, one that takes shape through use.

The barter system isn’t meant to be a solution or a grand realised vision. It’s just a small, situated experiment—one of many ways to test how art institutions might relate differently to their audiences, and how value might be understood in more open-ended ways.

Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn’t. It’s too early to say. But at the very least, it’s an attempt to make space for a brief shift in perspective. A moment where different assumptions can be tested, not in theory, but in practice.

And perhaps, hidden in these small exchanges, are traces of other stories—older, unfinished, or overlooked ways of valuing time, labour, and creativity. Not to romanticise or elevate them, but to take them seriously as part of a wider attempt to imagine something else. Not from outside the present, but inside it, part of a multiplicity of already existing alternatives to the present order of things waiting to take form.

#aarhusernr1 #frihedlighedoghiphop