Servitudes

Servitudes represents Jesper Just’s most ambitious project to date and a paean to his adopted city of New York in a moment of transition. Commissioned by the Palais de Tokyo, Paris for their expansive subterranean gallery space, Just began to research the exhibition hall, which dates from Paris’s 1937 World’s Fair. He discovered that during the Nazi occupation, its basement was used to store a cache of pianos seized from the city’s Jewish population. Just’s projects often pivot around music, and he thought also of a New York acquaintance whose daughter struggled with a disability (a rare, neurological disorder called Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease) yet was still able to play the piano.

In nearly all of Just’s poetic films and filmic installations, music provides the backbone for the viewer’s experience and even the structure of the space. The composition for Servitudes was created with the assistance of composer Elaine Radigue, and one hears echoes of the etude she created—and which the child plays on the piano in the first channel—throughout the various channels of the project. Across all of them, too, Just’s sensitivity to the ways in which we move through modern architectural space, as well as how buildings and the sounds that pervade them might choreograph our synesthetic experience of the city, combines with a vibrant and engaging cinematic vision.