Museums are collections of all and everything. And they are subject to the prejudice that a big part of it is dust. They show the alien, the curious, the far away. They talk to people or at least tell stories but are not famous for being on the road. The “Museum of Capitalism Bern” (subsequently the Museum) intends to change this. Under the slogan “capitalism belongs into a museum” the Museum critically examines the structuring principles of capitalism. But how does one take an abstract thing, the web that surrounds the spectators themselves, and make them take a step back to grasp it? How does one put capitalism into a museum?

It’s about making relationships work: building connections between things and creating things that connect. It’s about relating to others who share similar aims. And, last but not least, it takes a lot of work.

The Museum, of which we are a part, is a collective of eight people with various backgrounds. Some are good at building things, others are involved in research, skilled organizers, or able to make it all look appealing. What brings us together is a shared concern with the society we live in.

The first exhibition in 2019 in Bern was heavily influenced by the Museum of Capitalism in Berlin and addressed the general workings of capitalism. The Berlin colleagues generously shared their concepts with us, and we rebuilt exhibits, adapted them, and added completely new ones. The most recent exhibition considered the topic of work and was built and conceptualized from scratch. The exhibits should be as interactive as possible, addressing a wider audience, and involving them. There was a puzzle called “10 countries for a pair of jeans” to piece together the excessive journey of commodities; a pillar with headphones where you could listen to people talking about their work, or a colorful wall plastered with timesheets showing how people would spend their week if they weren’t dependent on wage work. Those timesheets were offered as a blank slate and the visitors imagined their own ideal week.

A further exhibit left quite the impression: “Elons Reistum”, a play of words with the German “reich”, rich, and “Reis”, rice. The exhibit questions the trope that rich people owe their wealth to their own hard work.

Making relations work

The exhibit presents two answers to the following question, which the visitors should answer. “How long does one have to work to become as rich as Elon Musk based on the Swiss median income of CHF 38.- per hour?”

As soon as the visitor feels ready, the curtains can be drawn to compare the imagined amount with the actual one. The human brain seems to struggle with grasping big numbers. So, they need to be translated, transformed into a graspable object. Something to relate to.

On the one hand, the amount of time is shown as a line. To get to this amount of money today, one would not have to start working only when rumors of Jesus and Christianity started spreading, nor when the region of today’s Bern was still covered under glacial ice, nor even when the first man-made fires were burning, but more than 100’000 years before homo habilis made the first stone tools. And this calculation is based on the Swiss median income, one of the highest in the world. Based on the median income of the world’s poorest countries, the timeline would reach back to the age of the dinosaurs.

On the other hand, to help visualize this unfathomable amount, there is a second scale. Not an orderly line but a heap of rice, one grain representing CHF 100’000 Swiss Francs – in Switzerland a very well-paid year’s worth of work. This alone needed approximately 40kg of rice.

(Note: The quantity of rice is based on data from 2022. As of June 2026, the heap would be approximately four times larger.)

Since even the creators of the exhibit were continuously boggled by the sheer amount, it came as no surprise that this new view provoked some reactions.

Relatable

«The more I look at it the angrier I get» one visitor exclaimed. We did not ask at the time what provoked this anger. It wasn’t the aim to record the reactions or conduct research. But it was still a space created, which led to reactions, and it is worth thinking about them.  It could have been an exclamation of an injured sense of fairness – about the inequality in the world. Or perhaps it arose from imagining what could be done with the value represented by just a single grain of rice.

But since the exhibit is concerned with wage-work and is found in the Museum of Capitalism, a Marxist interpretation of this anger seems fitting. According to Marx, the only thing able to create capitalist value is human work. And any wage-work is extortion since the labour is used to produce more value than what the people working get as wages. So, with any work they do there is necessarily an accumulation in opposition to them, which Marx calls alienation. In this sense the heap of rice depicts the amount of human work appropriated. Not the working hours of the owner but those of others. Maybe the visitors of the Museum saw a blink of their own lifetime condensed in a pile. This could certainly leave a bitter aftertaste.

So, the mountain of money shows the number of years for which people were put to work. Their restless movement is what begot the money. And at the same time, it represents the opportunity to put them to work again.

Although the extent visualized in the rice-exhibit is in no way comparable, it was also a lot of work to plan, organize, build, and operate a museum. At least for us it was too much alongside wage-, care-, and other work. But this seems to fit the general picture. One exhibit is an Infographic showing that in Switzerland more hours are worked unpaid than paid. But the visitors still seemed surprised when we answered their questions whether we are paid for our work with “no”. We also can not claim all of the work as our own. The Museum itself is a result of great support. From crowdfunding and fundraising events, practical assistance in building and running the exhibition, care in stressful times, to visiting and taking part.

Making relations

This also led to new connections. One visitor said that they themselves were artistically active and concerned with the same questions. They found their way to the Museum through a flyer in a theater they had visited. They suggested we contact another collective concerned with similar questions. Unbeknownst to us this had already happened and “art and care” were attending the presentation on “Care Revolution” by Gabriele Winker as well as the workshop the following day.

The second public event was also well attended. It was a screening of the Movie “Overseas” by Sung-a Yoon which accompanies migrant workers from the Philippines preparing for their work abroad. And since the screening was in collaboration with Studiyo Filipino, not only the usual suspects turned up, which added greatly to the following discussion with the researcher Dr. Beatriz Lorente and Alice Javier, who migrated from the Philippines to Switzerland. The graphic novel “Ferngespräch” by Sheree Domingo on mothers working abroad was sold afterwards, continuing the discussion in its own format.

And just as the discussion should continue, so too should the Museum continue to exist. It is imagined as a traveling museum. The first exhibition toured Switzerland until the exhibits started to disintegrate. The second one is built better. Although it is not yet clear where the Museum opens its doors next – with this blog it takes a further step.

Gerry Metzger is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Bern. The focus of his research is the entanglement of money and social life, with a particular emphasis on monetary transactions. He is a member of the interdisciplinary collective the Museum of Capitalism Bern.

Dr. des. Lena Joos is a postdoctoral researcher at the Historical Institute at the University of Bern. Her doctoral thesis examined future notions within transnational women’s and feminist movements between 1970 and 2000. Among others, she analyzed the influence of capitalism on future visions and utopias. She is a member of the interdisciplinary collective the Museum of Capitalism Bern.