Introduction: Why We Begin with a Seesaw

This project started from my personal confusion. In daily life, I've often been puzzled by how prices are set. Why should perfume, made cheaply, sell for hundreds of pounds? Discovering that such pricing aligns more with consumer self-perception than production value only deepened my confusion. Clearly, luxury perfumes and a £5 meal deal from Waitrose follow entirely different value logics, yet both use the same monetary standard. What kind of "value" flattens these differences into a single metric?

Driven by this curiosity, I began reading Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) and The Communist Manifesto (1848). These texts revealed that modern economic valuation systems, despite their rational facade, originate from historical extraction and structural inequalities. However, recognizing my own experiential and positional limits, I chose not to critique this immense structure systematically. Instead, I adopted a more personal and embodied approach, exploring value exchange as a lived and felt encounter.

The Seesaw Economy Manifesto emerges from these exploration—not as theory, but as a tangible object. It does not propose economic reforms or new financial structures. Rather, it offers participants a bodily experience, inviting a poetic, relational, and playful reimagining of value. Drawing on the idea that value is relational and performative (Graeber, 2001; Simmel, 2004), it explores how expression, movement, and language could become part of how we exchange meaning. The result is not a grand theory, but a kind of invitation—to tip, to respond, to co-balance.

The seesaw structure forms the manifesto’s spatial and emotional grammar, while participants co-create its content through movement, attention, and language. Thus, the project is both installation and proposition—a prompt to reconsider how we assign value and to experiment with alternative approaches.

The chapters that follow look at four related questions: How did we come to accept one form of value measurement as universal? What alternatives—historical or imaginary—exist? Can imbalance itself be a form of ethical relation? And what role does language play in shaping our perception of worth?

Ultimately, the seesaw is not a model to implement but an invitation to play, listen, and negotiate, reminding us that true balance lies not in stillness, but in care and movement.