The Banco de San Carlos, predecessor of the Banco de España, issued its first banknotes in 1783. In the nineteenth century, with the coming of the industrial revolution, this form of payment became standard in different societies. Only a few years ago it would have seemed unthinkable that one day these coins and banknotes would disappear from our pockets, but in as the twenty-first century progresses, this means of payment increasingly looks to be on its last legs. Fewer and fewer people are using cash to make transactions and the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the use of digital currencies, digital money transfer systems and online payment platforms. I therefore felt this was a good time to explore the extraordinary archive and documentation of the Banco de España, researching a variety of formal, technical and historiographical aspects to produce a work in atlas format. This is not the first time I have used paper money as an artistic medium. In my project Guilloche (2015) I used a hypothetical banknote as a suitable space for a drawing; from portraits to landscapes, appropriating pre-existing graphic materials and techniques used by large international companies that develop, produce and distribute products and solutions for payment, secure communication and identity management. In the cycle Capital. Merchandise. Money (2015) I explored the underworld of the deep web trying to find counterfeiters operating in our social media age.

Paper money is quite literally a piece of inert paper that is part of the structure of the movement of capital, something we can hold in our hand and manipulate at will; a printed piece paper, with various designs, marks and signatures to help guarantee its authenticity. Today's banknotes are produced on special paper made out of stretched cotton fibres, that use very complex printing techniques. The artist has been gradually replaced by computer graphic calculation programs that can interpret equations and produce all kinds of graphs and mathematical curves, hypotrochoids and epitrochoids, in the form of guilloches. Steganography, the checksum, tactile, optically variable, interactive and concealed effects, such as the digital watermark, the security thread, intaglio printing, microprinting, the EURion constellation, holographic bands and patches, matching patterns, the iridescent bands, optically variable inks and invisible flourescent fibres... The main purpose of these security procures is to prevent counterfeiting, adulteration and manipulation, or at least to prevent any alteration in the details from going undetected. Every country has some rules restricting the reproduction of images of banknotes. Counterfeiting currency is a criminal offence and, although the rules vary from country to country, in some places it is strictly forbidden to reproduce banknote images, even for artistic or advertising purposes. Even the world's oldest surviving banknote, a Ming dynasty yuan dating from 1375, includes a text setting out the punishment that would be meted out to anyone forging it. Since the first artistic engraving techniques, the banknote has constantly had to defend itself against something that has been a constant feature of all cultures and civilisations — forgery and imitation of original works.

The question of the original and the copy, reality and fiction, true or false, a recurring debate in the art world, is one of the lines of argument running through the atlas falso_de_época [period_fake] In the age of information and communication technologies and digital cloning, the limits of authorship have been blurred to such an extent that the notions of original works, replicas, copies, forgeries, imitations, pastiches and versions are no longer readily distinguishable.

period:fake takes a heterodox tour of this peculiar world of counterfeiting. It includes everything from documents taken from the Banco de España's excellent archives to images obtained using sophisticated police and forensic techniques. Microscopic enlargements become entwined with archive dossiers, period fakes with banknotes and authentic documents, the plastically formal with the bureaucratic, reality with the artistic device. Crime stories, the findings of the Banco de España's Investigation Brigade, comparison with works of art of infinite dedication and patience, or of political activism, heroes and tales of the underground during the Civil War and the Franco regime... There are anonymous tales, but others whose protagonists we know. Such is the story of Mariano Conde, the most famous forger in the history of the Spanish picaresque. In 1905, while Conde was being held in a prison in Ceuta, the governor, General Bernal cast doubt on his abilities. Two months later, the general was stunned to hear that the troops guarding a powder magazine had abandoned their posts on his orders. Upon inquiring into the matter, he was shown the order, bearing his forged signature and official stamps, together with other relevant papers. And then there was Laureano Cerrada, the railwayman from Miedes de Atienza, who was possibly the greatest and best known forger in the anarchist ranks. In 1945, after fleeing into exile in France, he set up a team to forge peseta notes, with a view to causing havoc to the Spanish economy. He used the counterfeit money to buy trucks and to set up a company called Empresa de Transportes Galicia, with which he planned to flood the peninsula with fake banknotes. In command of this operation was his inseparable accomplice Luis Robla. Over the years, they extended the scope of their forgeries to include coins, lottery tickets, documents, work contracts, property titles and even wills (anecdotally, Cerrada once forged tickets to the bullring in Nimes, tripling the capacity, and then retired to watch the ensuing riots from a nearby hotel). Among his collaborators were the draughtsman Guillembert, Pedro Moñino, Antonio Verardini, the libertarian artist and engraver Madeleine Lamberet and Mai Piquerai. Other leading names from the underground movement of the time included Cipriano Damiano, Lucio Urtubia, Agustín Centelles, Ramón Álvarez Palomo, José Riera García (Riereta), Amadeo Casares Colomer (Peque), Esteban Pallarols (Riera), Escobar, Génesis López, Leoncio Sánchez, Raimundo Jiménez, Segismundo Martínez and the Madrid painter Domingo Malagón. And more recently, who has not heard of the exploits of Juan Pedro González Sánchez? This Murcia forger achieved everyone's dream of making money without ever leaving home. For thirteen years he managed to operate undetected as the great counterfeiter of the euro. The European Central Bank itself warned of the danger posed by the quality of his banknotes. It is a world that will soon be confined to history. Today, currency has become a protocol, a cryptoactive digital medium of exchange operating through a decentralised database, usually a blockchain. It uses strong cryptography to secure transactions, to track the creation of any extra units and to verify transfers of assets using distributed logging technologies.

period_fake, this iconoclastic atlas, references a past world that has been radically transformed, in which the banknote has become code and the economy digital. Software is king, mathematics impose social order, security questions impose reality, the mechanical is algorithm, and hackers are the new modern artists, the new counterfeiters.

Daniel García Andújar