PROJECT: SITUATIONS OR THE ARCHITECTURE FOR ENCOUNTERS

To explore the role that architecture has in the production of encounters and relations is the reason why I got close to architecture. The project I did in 1996 was the dossier of my entry to SOA (School of Architecture) at Princeton University.

PRIVATE CABIN, THE ARCHITECTURE OF PLEASURE

The piece is a recreation of a peep show booth in an art gallery, Buades in Madrid 1996. It is an installation and also the mechanism to produce a photographic work that plays with the concepts: reality and presence; public and private; art, money and sex; pleasure, gender and work.

The visitor can choose to have a peep show experience and be observed or watch as the striptease girl and customer interact. If a person decide to enter the cost of each ticket is 500 pesetas ( $5 with a value of $50 at the time, 1996) and lasts 5 minutes. When the time is up, the light goes out. The peep show is in the back room adjoining the main room of the art gallery.

During 5 days, inside the peep show an analog camera on tripod with automatic motor and black and white film with a timer takes pictures every 30 seconds of the striptease girl and the client (Selection of 4 B/W pictures showing two people in a “private situation”). A video camera captures what happens in the back in real time showing it to the visitor also in real time on a monitor located in the front room of the gallery (5 tapes of 120 minutes each). A second video camera records in automatic the front room of the gallery that captures the reaction of the visitors watching by video, what happens in the back (the color photographs are a capture of that second video of the visitor before or after having been a customer when entering or leaving the peep show). All photography is done without a photographer.

This is how Manuel Fontán del Junco describes it in the magazine Untitled España under the title Verano Madrileño:

“Cabina Privada, el borde de la mirada 1996 in CHARCUTERIA one of the pieces in the exhibition convened by Miguel Cereceda and Mercedes Buades bets on an art that has the capacity to stir our consciences….

…In Charcuteria the most essential is a grandiose installation by Jana Leo called “borde la mirada” which almost manages to displace the rest of the exhibited pieces to the same place as its title indicates. She has reproduced in the gallery a “peep-show” booth, a plastic curtain marks the border between the visitor and an armchair against a background of mirrors in which a show girl is placed. A pedagogical panel warns us that the girl is “collaborating with the action”… she is of legal age and her name is Alma.

….In Jana Leo’s assembly manual, it is stated that a video camera will record whoever enters there, “approximately from the neck to the feet” and that whoever crosses the plastic border “for wanting to see, will be seen” recorded on video.

After many years since its production the piece was adquired by CA2M, in Madrid Community in Spain and soon after, the restoration of the footage was done and the video shown at TEA (Tenerife Museum of art)