The Offspring Resembles the Parent by Lina Selander

The Offspring Resembles the Parent (2015) was created for the Venice Biennale in relation to the artwork Working Archive (also by Lina Selander), which is to be installed in the corridor outside the President’s Office as part of the SSE permanent collection. The title, The Offspring Resembles the Parent, draws from Aristotle’s Politics, where he describes the accumulation of money through interest as an unnatural form of wealth—arguing that, unlike crops or livestock, money cannot reproduce, as it “exists not by nature but by law.”

The work engages with the idea that memory is inseparable from economy—not only in financial terms, but as a form of capital that is preserved, circulated, and inherited. The etymology of the word itself gestures toward this entanglement: from the Greek goddess Mnemosyne, guardian of memory and language, to the Latin monere (to remind), which later forms the root of both “money” and muntze, leading to the Swedish mynt (coin).

The film takes as its point of departure the emergency currencies issued during the crises of the 1920s—banknotes produced in moments of instability, within shifting or unregulated territories such as colonies, ghettos, or camps. These notes, often intricately designed, carry striking visual and rhetorical force, combining aesthetic ambition with propagandistic intent. Drawing on their almost cinematic qualities, Selander evokes a historical moment in which colonial projects—later understood as catastrophic—nonetheless contributed to shaping the economic and social frameworks of contemporary welfare states.

Presented in a university setting, the film opens a space for reflection that resonates with the institution itself: a site where knowledge is produced, transmitted, and accumulated, not unlike the economies the work examines. Without fixing a direct parallel, the screening invites consideration of how intellectual and cultural capital circulates, and how histories—economic, political, and epistemic—are continuously reframed through acts of study and display.

Still in progress at the time of writing, the work concludes in a meditation on fictive economies, latent power structures, forms of subordination, and an inflation of values—both human and monetary.

Lina Selander (b. 1973, Sweden) is an artist working with film and installation. Her work has been presented internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, and in exhibitions at major museums and institutions. Through a research-based practice, she brings together archival material, moving images, and philosophical inquiry to examine how historical narratives are constructed and how images function as carriers of memory across time.