This publication offers the first focused study of Adriana Martinez Barron’s decade-long series El Dinero Vuela (2014–2024), in which money is both the subject and the medium. Working with shredded banknotes, decommissioned currency, receipts, neon, and paintings, Martinez Barron transforms instruments of value into fragile, uncanny objects. Her works expose the contradictions at the heart of capital—its promises, its deceptions, its ephemerality.

Many of the objects were produced in Colombia in collaboration with Indigenous artisans and craftspeople, embedding the work with layered histories of labor, trade, and cultural resistance. Playful yet pointed, the entire body of works draws from the iconography of finance and consumer culture to explore the emotional charge of money: how it circulates, how it vanishes, how it shapes desire. Sculptures collapse under their own weight; collages fray at the edges; gilded surfaces wear thin. In Martinez Barron’s hands, wealth becomes unstable, vulnerable, even mournful. With full-color reproductions and a critical essay by Julieta Gonzalez, this book invites readers into a body of work that is as conceptually rich as it is materially volatile.