“This series traces the hyperinflation that struck Zimbabwe in the 2000s, combining my analog photographs with archival banknotes issued during that period. In 2015, I traveled to Zimbabwe to visit my father, who was working there at the time. We went on a road trip during which I noticed large, empty or dilapidated billboards. They became my starting point—an intuition that led me to wonder why there were no images displayed on them.
As I researched further, I learned that the country had experienced one of the worst economic crises in the world, with hyperinflation resulting from a series of political decisions made under the rule of Robert Mugabe, who came to power in 1980. Caught between the hope for a new world after the end of an apartheid regime and a repressive policy against political opponents, Robert Mugabe transformed the destiny of an entire country within just a few decades—a country that had once been the breadbasket of Southern Africa. This hyperinflation began in the early 2000s and continued to worsen until reaching its peak in 2008. Throughout this period, banknotes with absurdly high denominations were issued in an attempt to contain this economic tsunami; some of these notes even carried expiration dates to force the population to keep the currency in circulation.
The title of this series, One Hundred Trillion Dollars, refers to the highest-denomination banknote I was able to collect on site. To give a sense of scale, this amount was equivalent to about 40 US cents.
What happened in Zimbabwe is certainly the result of a specific economic, social, and political context, but it is also a striking example of the absurdity that capitalism—through the mechanisms of banking—can produce. This issue remains relevant in Zimbabwe today (albeit to a lesser extent than in 2008), and it is a phenomenon that continues to repeat itself in other countries and continents, such as parts of Latin America experiencing similar situations today.
At present, Zimbabwe is issuing a new gold-backed currency in an attempt to curb recurring inflationary episodes. Intended to be more stable, the ZIG is an effort to restore confidence in the country’s currency, fifty years after the end of the Bretton Woods agreements. The project One Hundred Trillion Dollars helps shed light on this decision: it is both a dive into the economic and political history of this Southern African country and a warning about what poor political decisions can generate within a capitalist framework.” Chloé Nicosia
This project, consolidated during her residency at ENSP in 2022 with the creation of a book dummy, truly took off in 2024. That year, it was selected for several prestigious festivals, including the Dummy Awards in Cologne, the Belfast Photo Festival, Photometria in Athens, the Athens Photo Festival (APHF), the Revela’t Festival in Barcelona, the I Star Award from the Photographic Social Vision Foundation in Catalonia, the Encontros da Imagem Festival in Braga, and the Singapore International Photography Festival, which awarded her a grant to present this work there at the end of October.
In 2025, One Hundred Trillion Dollars was awarded the prize at the 10th Biennale des Rencontres Photographiques.
Chloé Nicosia lives and works between Paris and Brussels. After earning a master’s degree in Political Science, she began her career as a correspondent for the regional daily press. Following a period at Agence France-Presse, she established herself in 2007 as a freelance photographer, developing an aesthetic primarily connected to the music world. Her work has been published in numerous media outlets (Libération, Grazia, Modzik, Le Bonbon, Elle, Mixte, À Nous Paris). Alongside this, she has maintained a visual art practice for several years, combining photography with material-based work (neon, collage, sculpture).
She has taken part in several gallery exhibitions in France and abroad (Belgium, Mexico), as well as twice in the Nuits Photographiques de Pierrevert.
In 2022, she self-published the book One Hundred Trillion Dollars, addressing the topic of hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, produced during her residency at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles (ENSP).
