Between Worlds — On Being Seen and What We Choose to Value

Someone recently described me as a person who “moves confidently across fields that many people rarely connect.”

I read that line in Gulf Magazine and sat with it for a while. It is a generous way of describing something that has, at various points in my life, felt less like confidence and more like restlessness. Growing up in Carinthia, at the edge of Austria where cultures and languages overlap and nobody quite fits neatly into one box, you learn to read the room. Multiple rooms, often at the same time.

What I did not expect is that this particular skill, this ability to live at the intersections, would one day lead me to a copper cross from the Congo. To a bronze vessel from a small island in Indonesia. To a piece of red wood that is still being used as money right now, in 2026, in a kingdom that colonial administrators once tried to replace with paper francs.

But here we are.

The collection that explains the crossroads

The Gulf Magazine article describes my work with the Alex Schütz Collection as “transforming something niche into a conversation with universal relevance.” That is accurate, but it leaves out the part where the objects do most of the work.

I do not have to argue for the relevance of these objects. I just have to describe them.

Take the Mombongo, a cast metal anklet from the Libinza people of the Congo. It weighs 4,441 grams. The word mombongo means money in the Libinza language. Not “this is used like money” or “this functions as a currency.” The object and the concept share the same name. A man without one could not legally marry.

Think about how much that single object contains. Economic system. Legal framework. Social identity. The weight of it on your body as a daily reminder of your place in the world. The history of what you owe and what is owed to you, made tangible in metal.

I grew up between cultures where meaning was always slightly in translation. The Mombongo needs no translation. It is, simultaneously, everything it means.

On bridges and copper crosses

The Gulf Magazine piece calls me a bridge builder. I think the Katanga Crosses are better bridge builders than I will ever be.

Seven pieces of cast copper from Central Africa. Each one between 798 and 1,098 grams, shaped in the form of a cross. Their exchange rate is documented with the precision of a bank ledger: in 1907, three to five crosses bought a male slave. In 1924, one cross bought ten kilograms of flour. In 1960, the cross became the official emblem of the State of Katanga.

The same object, travelling from colonial transaction to national symbol in the span of a single human lifetime.

What does it mean to build bridges between worlds? I think it means holding the full story. Not the comfortable version, not the version that fits on a label in a museum case, but the whole arc of an object’s life in the world. The violence and the beauty. The oppression and the sovereignty. The way meaning accumulates in metal and cannot be melted down.

That is what I try to do with this work. That is what Carinthia taught me to do with everything.

What ancient value systems have to do with modern ones

The Gulf Magazine article notes that I help people understand “how societies define value, exchange, and meaning across generations.” Here is the version that keeps me up at night.

The Tukula wood bar from the Kuba kingdom in Congo is a piece of red wood. In 1953, the Belgian colonial administration officially set its exchange rate at ten Congolese francs per piece. This was an act of desperation. They were trying to price it, measure it, bring it into the formal economy. Make it legible.

It did not work. Because Tukula was not only money. It was ritual material. It was cosmetic. It was sacred. You cannot legislate those functions away by assigning a franc value. The Kuba people already knew what it was worth, and their accounting system was richer than anything the colonizers brought with them.

Tukula is still in use today.

I think about this constantly in my work at the kfbö, in diplomacy, in every room where someone tries to reduce a complex human reality to a single measurable metric. The things that matter most to communities are almost always the things that resist being priced.

The object that stopped me

I want to tell you about the Monkey-head Mokko from the island of Alor in Indonesia, because it is the cover of the ASC catalogue and it is the object that stopped me the first time I really looked at it.

11.9 kilograms of bronze. Four monkey heads at the shoulders. Two celestial serpents winding around the body. Cast around 1800. Used as bride price. Used as blood money. Considered sacred on Alor to this day.

The Gulf Magazine article says I am drawn to “areas where different worlds intersect and where new understanding can emerge through dialogue.” This object is that principle in physical form. It is simultaneously economic contract, cosmological statement, ritual instrument, and artwork. It does not ask permission to be all of those things at once.

I have been lucky enough to stand in front of it. And every time, I feel the same thing: not awe exactly, but recognition. This is what serious engagement with the world looks like. This is what it means to hold multiple truths without letting any of them collapse into simplicity.

What the Gulf Magazine piece got right

The article says my story “is a reminder that leadership does not always come from following a straight path.” I would put it differently.

I think the straight path is a story we tell ourselves to make the world feel manageable. But the world is not manageable. It is layered and contradictory and astonishing, and the objects in the Alex Schütz Collection are proof of that.

A woman in 19th century Libinza could not separate her financial situation from her legal status from the weight of metal on her body. A man in the Kuba kingdom in 1953 watched colonial administrators try to price his sacred wood and knew they had missed the point entirely. A state in 1960 looked at a copper cross that had witnessed 700 years of exchange and decided: yes, this is who we are.

These are not primitive stories. They are not distant stories. They are stories about how humans navigate power and meaning and belonging. They are, in other words, our stories.

What comes next

The Gulf Magazine feature was a door. This newsletter is where I go deeper.

We are in active conversation with museums across Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and North America about bringing the ASC to a public exhibition. The collection, over 2,000 objects from more than 40 countries, has waited long enough.

We are working on it. More objects. More stories that started thousands of years ago and have not finished yet.

Next time: the iron gongs of the Zande.

The Alex Schütz Collection documents over 2,000 pre-monetary payment objects from 40+ countries across six continents. For exhibition enquiries and catalogue requests PM.

Read the full Gulf Magazine article. Enjoy!