As a young Portuguese artist, since 2017 Fábio Colaço has developed a body of work that seeks to reflect on the changing perception and value of money, as well as the unprecedented power it has exerted on the human imagination from ancient to contemporary times. Questioning the concepts of value and its manipulation, Colaço appropriates banknotes and coins to question the importance of the symbol through their imagistic transfiguration.

The installation- One Million
, 2020, consists of a pile of shredded bank notes equivalent to one million euros. These fragments of notes withdrawn from circulation because they were no longer fit for purpose were shredded at the artist's request. Part of an archetype of subversion and sarcasm typical of this artist's work, the work highlights and exposes the disparity between the real and symbolic value of money, which the notes only hold until they are destroyed. In this sense, a popularly recognised key value - one million, which alludes to the stereotypical image of treasure present in popular culture, particularly in games of chance - is reduced to a worthless pile of paper. Weighing approximately 300 kg, the pile also reveals the temporal and spatial history of money insofar as it symbolically represents its immense circulation and the crossing of borders, historical periods, and individual and collective memory.