Projects
Everything humans have ever valued — every temple, every harvest, every manuscript, every machine — required the same thing: the coordination of physical materials through directed effort. Value has always been rooted in the physical world. What changes across civilizations is not the physics but the accounting — how societies chose to measure, preserve, and exchange what mattered to them.
Rubedo runs three standing investigations into this question. Each is a different probe into how value and collaboration actually work.
A collection of documentaries, each produced with a collaborating filmmaker in one of Canada's 57 co-production treaty territories, exploring how that culture understood and measured value in its own terms. What did they treat as wealth? What did they build to protect it? How did their answers shape their creative and economic life? Each documentary is an independent investigation — the common thread is the question, not the answer.
A working catalogue of tools borrowed from other fields — financial instruments, engineering practices, coordination mechanisms — each examined for how it might be imported into the way creative and collaborative projects get built. Speculative by design; closer to field notes than to a published paper.
A growing record of historical creative expenditure, standardized in gold weight. Each entry is a transaction converted into grams of fine gold, comparable across centuries and currencies. The bibliography behind the documentaries, and the anchor for the gold-as-unit-of-account thesis.
Pitch a project
Rubedo is interested in scripted and factual feature-length projects originating from any of the co-producing partner territories. If you have a project you'd like to bring to Canada — or a Canadian project you'd like to bring to a treaty partner — tell us about it.
contact@rubedo.ca