Imagine the Coach Museum with two motorized horses, the kind that are coin-operated, static, with Jonas & Lander sitting on them. For something to happen, the audience has to insert a coin into the horses’ slot. The code is known to everyone since childhood. However, here the result gives rise to different performative moments that can range from singing to dancing alone or in pairs, a speech or a dissertation accompanied by guitar, or a group that bursts into the space dancing a slow dance in pairs. And all this, for as long as a coin “buys.”

“Coin Operated” arose from an invitation from BoCA to Jonas & Lander to create a piece for a museum, where the dialogue with the audience is direct and dependent on it. Jonas & Lander design a new relationship with the viewer, in which the latter takes on an active role in the consequence of the artistic action, enhancing diverse and surprising scenes with each presentation, that is, the duration of each coin inserted into the horses.

The songs, speeches, dissertations, historical curiosities, all the actions and information in/from the performance translate the symbolism of the visible: a man riding a horse and everything that this moment of domestication involves and has involved during the period of the forging of civilizations. The entire relationship of economics and power, of territorial conquest, of slavery, of the most powerful social classes riding on the less fortunate; all these issues will be dissected in performative sequences. As long as there is a coin.