Borders are invisible lines. Some are drawn into the sand and shape our perception of reality. Borders exist only in our minds and challenge us to constantly re-evaluate the delineations of our identities – they should be agile, permeable, queer and blurred. The destabilizing effect of this reexamination influences what people’s values are, putting up to discussion what identity is. Which roles do origin, history and geography play in it? The repression of thoughts and feelings renders visible a person’s relationship to their past and their connection to their values. It raises the issue of self-acceptance. We care about the visibility of those who are oftentimes forgotten or marginalized in our collective memory. We insist and we remain insistent.
Covid-19 has shifted the scope of our perception. Longstanding values and concepts have proven to be useless and new ones are yet to be found. Where are we? We wander around in the dark. Where are we going? Will we ever arrive?
Dark is dangerous. You can’t see anything in the dark, you’re afraid. Don’t move, you might fall. Most of all, don’t go into the forest. And so we have internalized this horror of the dark. – Hélène Cixous
The marginalised, migrating body is very central in this context. This is about much more than refugees or asylum seekers. As an example, Paul B. Preciado, transgender theorist, writes in his latest book of the trans body as a migrating body. During transition, the trans body embarks on a journey and tries to arrive again and again. Social and activist movements function as dislocations. They push for change and systemic and structural renewal. Allyship and the development of new forms of collective identities are crucial to this. With that in mind, the institution is confronted with its limits and their reassessment and displacement.
Just as respect and acceptance presuppose the recognition of the other, the condition for contempt and hatred is often the failure to recognize the other. In hatred too, the cause of the emotion is not necessarily the same thing as its object. – Carolin Emcke
– Marc Streit
Zurich young people from different quarters of the city of Zurich come together for two weeks in the Südbühne of the Gessnerallee and embark on a (dance) adventure together.
| Next 2 Dates | |
| Sat8.5. | |
| Sat8.5. | |
A performance outlining an invisible city of the dead mapped from the graves of the migrants who could not reach their final destinations in Europe.
| Fri14.5. | |
| Sat15.5. |
The tablet is used to travel through the periphery of the city - visiting possible locations for a future film in a strangely deserted environment, in which their trail seems to be lost in the end.
| Next 2 Dates | |
| Sat15.5. | |
| Sun16.5. | |
| Sun16.5. |
A theatrical tour through the recent history of global trade, by Tim Zulauf/KMUProduktionen in collaboration with the Swiss Finance Museum and Gessnerallee.
| Next 2 Dates | |
| Thu20.5. | |
| Sat22.5. | |
| Fri21.5. |
A project about protest and adaptation by LAB Junges Theater Zürich.
| Next 2 Dates | |
| Wed26.5. | |
| Thu27.5. | |
With Wild Things, Corsin Gaudenz and his team once again create a musical theater for a young+ audience and set accents in this theater area through great experimentation with music, movement and space, as well as the imagination.
| Next 2 Dates | |
| Sat29.5. | |
| Sun30.5. | |
| Sun30.5. |
OTHERWISE — Polymorphic Futures is a hybrid festival dedicated to the potential of artistic research to contribute to societal and ecological transformations. In the first online symposium we will look at the theme mutagenesis.
| Next 2 Dates | |
| Wed2.6. | |
| Thu3.6. | |
Concert by Pablo Nouvelle (solo) / Support: Wolfman. Followed by club night with DJ Cosmic Love Tier.
| Fri4.6. |
The two artists Sarah Burger and Maya Rochat re-dressed Stall 6 last autumn with their intervention Goodnight Nature. To celebrate this, they invited their favourite musicians for one evening: HOWALD & Kotzfrucht.
| Fri11.6. |
During the feminist strike, we are showing a curated selection from EXPOSURE in the entrance area of Stall 6, in which these health workers answer the question: “what was your most beautiful experience during the first wave?”
| Mon14.6. |
| Next 2 Dates | |
| Thu17.6. | |
| Fri18.6. | |
WIRREN is chamber music for anarchists and social media addicts, sleepwalkers and day thieves, social romantics and post-structuralists, for those who are drowning in everyday life, for the superstitious and the control-obsessed, for everyone who can read a map and for everyone who can't read a map.
| Fri18.6. | |
| Sat19.6. |
The third Criptonite edition is looking at the connections between disability, inspiration, superpowers and heroism.
| Sat19.6. |
[udbhid, poshu ebong manuser obhiprayon] #1
ogether with invited people connected to this geographical region, the Institute for Plant, Animal and Human Migration is developing a spectral storytelling that fills our collectively sketched spaces of possibility with vividness and poetry.
| Sun20.6. |
A kind of security conference on the goodness of Switzerland with an uncertain outcome.
| Fri2.7. |
In the Listening series Other Planes of There, the three artists Caroline Ann Baur, Vanessà Heer and Tina Reden invite us to speculate on future forms of coexistence through sonic fabulation.
| Sat3.7. |
NIEMANDSLAND [No Man's Land] is a partially mirrored immersion space permeated by a propelling composition of sounds and noises from everyday life.
| Next 2 Dates | |
| Wed7.7. | |
| Wed7.7. | |
Protokolle Tilo Frey – «colonial Walk» is a performative meander through the streets of Zurich exploring the subjects of colonialism and racism.
| Next 2 Dates | |
| Thu8.7. | |
| Fri9.7. | |
| Next 2 Dates | |
| Thu8.7. | |
| Fri9.7. | |
| Wed28.7. |
Simone Aughterlony returns to her reflections on otherness, which were already at the core of her performances Compass and Maintaining Stranger, both of which were presented at the Gessnerallee during past seasons.
