The Body for the Body of Writing
Christoph Büchel’s Monte di Pietà
In 1542, Titian painted a portrait of a woman he had never seen: Caterina Cornaro. She had died thirty-two years earlier. The artist depicted her as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, with the martyr’s wheel, in Turkish silk, with a face he invented or copied from other portraits. The posthumous portrait is a strange genre. It produces a person retroactively. Titian was creating a document: the Venetian version of history, in which the Queen of Cyprus voluntarily abdicated and returned to the mother republic. This version was a lie. In February 1489, Caterina’s brother arrived in Famagusta with an ultimatum from the Senate: abdicate or be declared a rebel. The chronicler recorded: «Her eyes did not cease shedding tears.» She signed.
In the spring of 2024, Christoph Büchel constructed a bankrupt pawnshop across three floors of Ca’ Corner della Regina, a building that had actually functioned as a pawnshop from 1834 to 1969. Visitors entered through a facade bearing the inscription «LIQUIDAZIONE TOTALE — FUORI TUTTO — VENDESI.» In the rooms: objects spanning four millennia. Cuneiform tablets, Venetian beads made for African markets, slave traders’ chains, credit documents, pawn tickets. The portrait of Caterina, brought from the Uffizi, hung in the building where she was born.
Caterina’s body functioned as a site for the production of legal facts. At fourteen: a marriage contract by proxy with the King of Cyprus; the document recorded a transaction in which the Cornaro family’s trading rights and sugar plantations were exchanged for a dynastic connection. At thirty-five: an act of abdication; the document created the transfer of a kingdom to Venice. After death: the posthumous portrait; the document legitimized an annexation that was by then half a century old. Each time, the body served as a surface upon which inscription produced a new reality. Silvia Federici demonstrated that the primitive accumulation of capital operated through two parallel processes: control over women’s bodies in Europe and the enslavement of bodies in the colonies. The witch hunts and the transatlantic slave trade are not separate histories but two sides of a single mechanism. Büchel’s exhibition materializes this connection: Caterina’s portrait hangs a few meters from a credit document from 1852 in the American South, in which enslaved people are pledged as collateral for a loan. Four centuries separate them. The logic is the same: the document precedes the body it purports to describe.
Near the portraits: carved wooden busk stays, dated 1905–1912. The exhibition label states: gifts from grooms to brides, «debito d’amore,» a debt of love. An intimate object worn by the bride on her body, beneath her clothing. But the busk stay is not a gift in the modern sense; it is a document of betrothal, recording an obligation between families. Love here is a form of credit. Marriage is repayment. Maurizio Lazzarato wrote of the female body as the «absolute commodity»: not simply an object of exchange but the site where the very possibility of exchange is produced. Caterina’s body produced dynastic legitimacy. The bodies of brides produced family alliances: first the inscription (contract, busk stay, portrait), then the reality that this inscription supposedly reflects. The female body was the testing ground. Here the logic of «to inscribe is to create» was perfected before it spread to racialized bodies, to territories, to genetic resources.
Venice was the place where technologies of inscription were systematized and made exportable. In 1494, Luca Pacioli published here the Summa de Arithmetica, the treatise that codified double-entry bookkeeping for dissemination via the printing press. Pages from this edition are on display. Pacioli codified and systematized existing practices, making them widely teachable and reproducible across Europe. Debit and credit, assets and liabilities: a language in which anything can become a line in a ledger. Including the body. Édouard Glissant called this the violence of transparency: the coercion into total legibility, the denial of the right to opacity. Double-entry bookkeeping demands that everything be translated into number. The enslaved person entered into the ledger is stripped of what Glissant considered a fundamental right: the right to be misunderstood, to be irreducible to a unit of account.
Monte di Pietà: the Catholic pawnshops that arose in fifteenth-century Italy as an alternative to Jewish moneylending. Ca’ Corner della Regina was a pawnshop for 135 years, from 1834 to 1969. The pawn ticket is a performative document; it does not describe the pledge relationship, it creates it. The object becomes collateral at the moment of inscription; without the ticket, there is no pledge. The exhibition accumulates unredeemed tickets, papers that promised a return that never occurred. The bankrupt pawnshop presents a paradox: an institution founded on the promise of redemption itself ceases to exist. Documents that were supposed to guarantee return now record its impossibility.
In one vitrine: three documents side by side. Yves Klein’s Carnet de reçus pour les zones de sensibilité picturale immatérielle, 1962: a receipt book for the sale of immaterial zones. Klein sold emptiness for gold; the buyer received a receipt, and if they wished to «fully possess» the zone, they had to burn it while Klein threw half the gold into the Seine. Beside it: a receipt of slave emancipation from Suriname, 1868. Beside that: a credit document from the American South, 1852, in which enslaved people are listed as collateral for a loan.
Three receipts. Three acts in which the document produces what it purports to describe. The 1852 document creates people as collateral: before signing, they were property; after, they were loan security that could be seized upon default. The paper transforms the legal status of the body. Klein’s receipt creates ownership of an immaterial zone, that is, of nothing; the zone did not exist before the receipt, the document generates the object that can now be owned. The emancipation receipt creates freedom, but freedom here is not a condition but a legal fact produced by inscription. Saidiya Hartman demonstrated that emancipation did not abolish violence; it reconfigured it. The one who grants freedom thereby confirms that they had the right not to grant it. The receipt liberates and subjugates in a single gesture. Klein is a canonical conceptualist; his receipts are in museums of contemporary art, dissertations have been written about them. The receipt from Suriname is a historical artifact. But the performative logic is identical. Conceptual art did not invent the document that produces reality. It inherited it from systems of property, including property in persons.
On display: a photograph of Marta Minujín’s performance Payment of the Argentine Foreign Debt to Andy Warhol with Corn, the Latin American Gold, 1985. Minujín «pays» Argentina’s foreign debt to Warhol in corn. Beside it: Warhol’s own Time Capsule 1, 1955–1971, a cardboard box filled with letters, newspaper clippings, refuse. An archive of accumulation. Minujín gives; Warhol collects. She produces a performance of payment; he produces an archive of storage. Corn, a plant stolen from the Americas by Europeans, is now «returned» as payment for a debt that Latin America supposedly owes. The transaction is absurd, and precisely for that reason it exposes the logic. Denise Ferreira da Silva has shown that colonial debt is unpayable not because it is too large but because the system of accounting itself is colonial. It is impossible to pay a debt in a currency created by the system that produces that debt. Minujín pays in corn; she exits the system of accounting. But exit is impossible: the performance is documented, the photograph circulates, the gesture becomes «art» in an «exhibition.»
In 1888, the Congo Free State, the private property of Leopold II, received a loan of 150 million francs. Between 1885 and 1908, by various estimates, between one and fifteen million people died while resources were extracted to service this debt. The exhibition includes documentation of the loan. The Congo’s debt remains unpaid to this day; the country continues to service obligations whose structure was established in the nineteenth century. Beside it: Theaster Gates’s Stony Island Arts Bank Bond, 2013, a bond addressing the ongoing extraction from Black communities in Chicago through redlining, disinvestment, predatory lending. The same bodies that were collateral in 1852 remain sites of value extraction in 2013. The 1852 document and Gates’s bond are two ends of one line; Büchel juxtaposes them without comment.
In a vitrine on the piano nobile: an open suitcase containing laboratory-grown diamonds. Diamond Maker, 2020, an ongoing project that will be completed by the artist’s death. The process: Büchel incinerates all his works, including childhood drawings, through pyrolysis. From the ash, the Swiss company ALGORDANZA, which specializes in memorial diamonds, extracts carbon. Büchel also contributes his own feces as an additional source. The certificate specifies: the carbon and graphite for the HPHT diamonds derive from Christoph Büchel’s excrement. Through a process of high pressure and high temperature, this material becomes diamonds, chemically indistinguishable from mined ones.
Beside it: six cans of Piero Manzoni’s Merde d’artiste, 1961. Manzoni canned his feces and sold them at the price of gold per gram, forcing the art market to accept excrement as value. Büchel completes the transformation: shit literally becomes diamonds. But something else matters more. Diamond Maker is a document deferred until death. The ALGORDANZA certificate records an obligation that will be fulfilled when the artist dies. Büchel has pledged his own death as the final act of value production. He owes the system his body, and the document certifies this.
Büchel created a hyperrealistic fake auction catalogue, styled after the Bollettino delle Aste Giudiziarie, the official bulletin of judicial auctions from the Venice Tribunal. The document announces Ca’ Corner della Regina for sale: the building and all exhibition objects as numbered lots, bidding on November 25, 2024, the day after the exhibition closes. Ethiopian wheat seeds confiscated during the colonial period and stored in jars labeled «Italo» become «Lot 096.» The Plutei of Trajan: «Lot 002.» The suitcase of diamonds: «Lot 021.» The catalogue performs what all the documents in the exhibition perform: it fragments the connected into numbered units. Walter Benjamin wrote that the religion of debt means «no longer the reformation of being but its fragmentation.» The auction catalogue executes fragmentation literally.
Among the objects on display: items from the collection of Giovanni Pietro Campana (majolica, glass, antique seals) arrived from the Louvre. Campana was director of the Roman Monte di Pietà from 1839 to 1857; he financed his collection with the institution’s funds, was convicted of embezzlement, and the collection was confiscated and sold to France. These objects have already passed through an actual foreclosure: confiscation, auction, museification. Now they are included in Büchel’s fictive foreclosure, assigned new lot numbers in the fake catalogue. The 2024 document catalogues objects that were produced as «assets» by the 1861 document. The recursion is infinite; foreclosure does not end, it reproduces.
The exhibition closed a year ago. Caterina’s portrait returned to the Uffizi, a document that completed its work thirty-two years after the death of the one it created. The pawn tickets remain unredeemed; the 1852 document continues to list people as collateral; the emancipation receipt continues to produce a freedom that does not abolish violence. All of these are closed documents: they have done their work, their time has passed.
The Diamond Maker certificate remains open. It awaits Büchel’s death in order to close. The diamonds in the suitcase already exist, but the document that certifies them has not yet fulfilled its function to the end. Between the portrait that produced a dead woman and the certificate that awaits a death: five hundred years. The entire exhibition is situated in this interval: documents that have already created their reality, and one document that is not yet closed.
The German word Schuld means both «debt» and «guilt.» But as long as the document remains open, something opaque persists within it: time that has not yet become inscription. The time that remains is the time that cannot be owed.
Liza Kin
Berlin, December 31, 2025
Christoph Büchel exhibition: Monte di Pietà Fondazione Prada
Ca’ Corner della Regina Venice
April 20 – November 24, 2024