UNVEILED as a new art installation in the heart of Bonifacio Global City, passersby can witness a live recital of Filipino and Czech poems along High Street, now a permanent home of the Poetry Jukebox.
This ingenious Czech concept that aims to make public spaces around the world livelier and give voice to public art by playing poetry on demand has been installed in public spaces around Europe, Israel and most recently, in New York.
Now it is ready to bring the magic of poems to Taguig City—the first in Asia that will enjoy listening to Czech and local verses featured in the invention.
The Czech Embassy in Manila, which worked in cooperation with Bonifacio Art Foundation, the Poetry Jukebox—first of its kind in the Philippines—was installed in a ceremonial unveiling in November at Greenspine Park, across the Mind Museum.
According to Ambassador Jaroslav Olša Jr., who was behind the idea, the Poetry Jukebox will be donated as a gift to the people of the Philippines to permanently mark the 100th anniversary of independence of the modern Czech state in 1918.
The significance of this activity is echoed through the Poetry Jukebox’s main message of making the spaces public, and placing the ownership of these places to people. The project also allows passersby to stop in their daily rush, listen to poems for a while and rediscover the beauty around them through a mystic experience of poetry coming to them in the “non-poetry age.”
Another “reason for being” of the Poetry Jukebox is the rehabilitation of poetry by bringing Czech and Filipino poems back to the people and showing them that poems are charming and inspiring parts of one’s culture and heritage.
For this project, a huge number of creative people from Manila were brought together to feature 20 poems by Czech, Slovak and Filipino poets who delivered the poems in English and Filipino. Featured poems are from notable Filipino authors, namely Gémino Abad, Virgilio Almario, Mikael Co, Joselito de los Reyes, Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, Jerry Gracio, Allan Pastrana, Ildefonso Santos, Rolando Tinio and Alfred Yuson.
Filipino writer Sarge Lacuesta carefully selected the pieces and also produced the recording of all poems, voiced by him, Indra Cepeda, Co, Katigbak-Lacuesta, Pastrana, Lourd de Veyra and Yuson.
On the other hand, Czech poetry is represented by poems of Ladislav Seifert, Vítězslav Nezval, Antonín Sova, Václav Hrabě, Jiří Orten, Fráňa Šrámek and Jan Křesadlo, to name a few. “Progressive poetess” Eleni Cay represents Slovak poetry.
Co and Almario, chairman of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, translated them to Filipino. Both were also present during the Jukebox’s public introduction.
Its inventor, cultural activist and “change maker” Ondřej Kobza, has initiated a large number of cultural interventions in the Czech Republic and around the world. By installing pianos and chess tables in the streets, dusk concerts inside post offices, literature readings inside city courtyards, or tango dancing lessons in train stations, he is motivated to change urban spaces into art works and introduce a new paradigm of social interaction through cultural interventions in the public sphere.
As Kobza said: “The Poetry Jukebox is a bottom-up approach to urbanism, as opposed to the traditional top-down strategies. I hope that it will gain popularity among the peoples of Taguig City and Metro Manila.”
To know more about the Poetry Jukebox, visit www.thepoetryjukebox.com.
Image credits: Tilak Hettige