The device features two static coin operated horses, with Jonas & Lander seated on it. For something to happen, the audience has to insert a coin into the horses. The code has been 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 the guitar or a group that bursts into space dancing in pairs a slow. And all this, for the duration that a coin “buys”.
“Coin Operated” comes from an invitation by BoCA to Jonas & Lander, to create a piece for the National Coach Museum in Lisbon, where the dialogue with the public is direct and dependent on it. Jonas & Lander design a new relationship with the spectator, in which he takes an active role in the consequence of the artistic action, enhancing different and surprising scenes at each performance, that is, the duration of each coin inserted into the horses.
The songs, speeches, dissertations, historical curiosities, all the actions and information in/of the performance translate the symbology of the visible: a man mounted on horseback and everything that this moment of domestication involves and involved during the forging period of civilizations. The economic and power relationship, the conquest of territory, slavery, the mounting of the more powerful social classes to the less fortunate; these subjects are dissected in performative sequences. As long as there is a coin.
