My currency is heavy. There is trouble when I'm traveling from El Paso to JFK to Dhaka. You can imagine customs and my explanations. They refuse to be paid off in stones.

Carrying money is not like carrying love. It is not the weight of the heart, the cock, the breast, the mind of another in your hand. It cannot compromise my internal structure in the same way. If you examined the fault lines, they would be different.

A story is 64 years old. What is that worth? After the war, my old lover's grandfather pushed around his wheelbarrow full of bound notes. A Munich wheelbarrow of dollars for a singular loaf of Munich bread. I was trying to pretend that cash didn't exist for 37 years.

For me this is new money with alien bloodlines. Money from another planet. It promises intimate exchange. It presupposes that we know how to trade fairly. Here is this stone. I don't take your work for granted.

A story is three days old. I pay 50 earth dollars for it, the cost of my phone plan. My ma is on the phone from Alaska. I tell her about my currency...how heavy it is. She tells me a story in response. She says: I remember there was an island where stones... massive boulders...were too large to casually move. These stones had owners. Goods were waged against the worth of the stone, but the stones always remained in the same place. It was their owners who would change.

This work was commissioned by e-flux for its "time/bank" project and displayed at the Frieze Art Fair 2009. e-flux requested the design of five denominations. Here the 'bills' come in various sizes, all stones. As the currency's value increases the weight of the stone also increases. Money crushes.

Thanks: James Vicente, Jace Clayton, Naeem Mohaiemen, Lorenza Perelli