Interview with Philip Sajet for the exhibition Cash at Espace Borax

Lab-grown diamonds are getting cheaper and cheaper, the dollar is slowly losing its hegemonic position, and bitcoin is drowned in the endless flow of new cryptocurrencies. What do you think will be the next icon representing money?
-It’s time.


You use very few tools, and you cut some of the stones yourself. Are you a “profitable” artist?
-I can tell you, I think if I make 5 euros an hour, that’s not bad.


You titled your ring Jewellery is my Currency, The Jewel is my Money. Have you ever paid a bill directly with a piece of jewelry?
-I tried once to pay my dentist with a piece of jewelry. I said, and that was my mistake, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.


Sociologist Paola Tabet describes, in her book Continuity of Economico-Sexual Exchanges, situations in which money and jewelry serve as compensation for sexual and emotional exchanges. You, who have been married several times, including to a jeweler, do you think jewelry is sometimes a form of currency in relationships?
-You know I’m a jeweler, so I make rings, yes. And what does a woman want to have? A ring. And I’ve made 500 of them, I totally agree with her.


Jewelry sometimes serves as a reserve in case of hardship, sometimes to assert social status. Artistic jewelry often has a relatively high cost. Are they doomed to be bourgeois? Are there contemporary popular jewelry pieces?
-I think so. But it depends. The moment the jewel becomes more important than the person wearing it, it has crossed the line into bigotry, let’s say.


You said in a 2017 interview that you dreamed of having a kilo at your disposal. In 2025, gold costs three times more, and you exhibit a silver ring for a dollar. Do you still have the means to realize your dreams?
-With 5 euros an hour, you’re joking.


Jewelry is crossed by questions of gender, class struggle, and colonial violence. They sometimes serve as diplomatic signals like Madeleine Albright’s brooches, or as archives to study the structural racism of Zionism toward Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in Ariella Aïcha Azoulay’s work. Aren’t jewels political first, before being entertainment?
- I think we live in a matrix. And it’s the task, the artist’s obligation, to get out of a matrix. And the moment the jeweler makes a jewel that serves the system, politics, or a concept outside the heart, that’s not the purpose of the jewel.
So I find it misleading the moment it becomes, let’s say, like Albright or all the Chinese, all the Koreans, the moment it becomes a status thing instead of a personality thing, that’s not my thing.

Are you moved or sensitive to jewelry that, perhaps, isn’t trying to assert or display status, or manipulate an image, but rather carries a political message or provokes a reflection?
-Me, I don’t like that. I think a jewel should still be a dream that is untouchable, but has become touchable.