Jukebox

Artists continue to be interested in space and participation. Space (architectural) is interesting as a meeting point and area for interaction, as well as a place for (real) participation between the subjects involved. If space conceived in this sense finds correspondence with an institutional, religious or civic entity, a church or museum, as well as its inhabitable cell, participation can be spontaneous or induced.

Usually, the more induced the participation is the more the accent is placed on the real character of this participation, resulting in questionable outcomes. Anyone who has set foot inside one of these modern-era artist’s structures in order to test his or her own experiential capabilities, knows full well just how seriously the organizers monitor any apparent freedom of movement.

With similar characteristics, Jukebox could in fact be assimilated inside an architectural space. But this would be a mistake. It wasn’t conceived to welcome spectators, to measure the extension of relative experiences between one subject and another, or between subject and the environment, as usually happens today. On the contrary, Jukebox is a space for artists and artists alone, in this case musicians.

The thread that connects this space with the spectator is analogous to the relationship the spectator entertains with memories, dreams and, by extension, desire. His or her experience does not take place inside, but in a shadowy realm, in the plots, both interior and exterior, that the space weaves around itself.

Now, if we hypothesize that culture can be defined as the relationships that are established between different subjects within a space/environment, including cells created by artists through various organizing entities, then Jukebox is a metaphor for culture, in that it is formed of a relationship that pertains in a prevalent, perhaps even exclusive manner to the past, rather than to the present.

The spectator is not free save in virtue of the memory of this relationship, which the musician protects and passes on, free in turn for nothing if not for his as-yet-active role as “waterman”, as in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. 

The concert the spectator witnesses from outside Jukebox is not, therefore, a “concert” in the usual sense, but rather the memory of all the concerts he or she may have witnessed or may yet witness.

The musician inside Jukebox does not perform: he or she renews that which others created earlier, passed down and which now, for the benefit of a hypothetical spectator, record again for the umpteenth time. It would even be legitimate to doubt his or her presence.