Elly (Positive Money Affirmation) (2025) is a 17-hour digital video by Marc Kokopeli that examines the relationship between childhood media, wealth consciousness, and the systems through which ideology is absorbed. Structured through two competing visual layers, the work places archival documentary footage of New York’s social history beneath a looping animation of a winged elephant that repeatedly floods the screen with flickering cash before clearing it away. The documentary component is the original 8-part series directed by Ric Burns titled New York; A Documentary Film. Released episodically between 1999 and 2003, the film chronicles New York’s evolution from Dutch settlement to global financial centre and the events of 9/11. The film maintains a keen sense of class and racial tension as a backdrop to the city’s development and addresses histories of racialised policing and scapegoating. In stark contrast, the animated overlay evokes the reassuring aesthetics of children’s entertainment and contemporary self-help culture.

By combining these contrasting registers, Kokopeli produces a sustained psychological tension in which spectacle competes with historical memory. Through its direct appropriation, and animated overlay, the work draws attention to the ways capitalist narratives of aspiration and positivity can obscure structural inequalities, parodying the visual language of money manifestation media and motivational affirmations. Repetition becomes both hypnotic and unsettling, suggesting the early formation of economic values through entertainment, education, and mass culture. Installed on a portable flatscreen accompanied by two plastic casts in the shape of stacks of dollar bills, Elly (Positive Money Affirmation) extends Kokopeli’s ongoing exploration of obscure historical media devices; the delivery system in dialogue with the media itself lending additional layers to the works meaning. The return of the fictional animated figure of Elly, developed across earlier video works, here concentrates a meditation on conditioning, labour, and desire.