Marta Minujín

In the light of this experience, during which the visitor enters an apparently conventional public telephone booth which produces seven special effects when he/she makes a call to another phone in the city, this work by the bold pioneer Minujín (Buenos Aires, 1943) is a doubly extraordinary achievement. Here, the original 1967 booth and the contemporary copy for the 2010-2012 exhibition are displayed, together with a book containing illustrations of the exhibitions and documentation on researches on Minuphone, published by Espacio Fundación Telefónica, with the collaboration of Fundación Espig

Minujín became aware at an early stage of her career of the importance of the media and technology in our lives. Thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship, in 1966 she relocated to New York, where she delved deeper into her explorations; the most famous result of this experience, Minuphone, was installed in the Howard Wise Gallery of New York, but it was never shown in Argentina. Built with the help of an engineer from Bell Company, the telephone booth offered sensorial effects when a real number was dialed. In the current version, created by experts convened by Telefónica, the same effects of light changes, breezes, ascent of colored water, voice deformations, plays with photo-sensitive paper, the transmission of the speaker’s image to a monitor on the floor of the booth, the taking of a photo of the visitor, were all respected, with the exception of the emission of smoke and helium gas that was featured in the original booth. There is yet another effect: visitors rejoice when feeling that they are entering a mythical space and in addition, they receive their picture to take home as a souvenir.