Schedule of Activations June 11 – 17
Daily | 10:00AM – 8:00PM | Gravel | Lara Almarcegui
Artist Lara Almarcegui orchestrates a large scale installation of gravel deposits from an active quarry, and has created a guide to abandoned quarries throughout the City of Basel. Growing daily in increments of 250 tons (mirroring the average volume of gravel extracted from a Basel quarry), the work serves as an invitation to reflect on the consequences of our extractive relationship to the land.
Almarcegui has created a publication which contains information about these ‘wastelands’ awaiting a new function. The publication is free and available to the public on site at Basilea.
Daily | 10:0AM – 8:00PM | How to Build Yourself an Auditorium | Recetas Urbanas
Recetas Urbanas led by architect Santiago Cirugeda, is working with local and international volunteers to collectively design and build a multi-purpose civic structure, using locally sourced and second-hand materials. Participants learn from and teach each other through collective exchange and collaboration. The civic structure is open to all and activated by programs and performances.
Daily | 10:00AM – 11:00PM | Opening Session | Isabel Lewis, Nuno Damaso, Ursula de Almeida Goldfarb
Guided by martial arts and Chinese medicine specialist Nuno Damaso of Taekwondo Schule Basel, this open public session will work with principles of Qigong and Tai Chi. These advanced forms of energy work are explored collectively and guided to incorporate rather than shut out or ignore the sensory input of the urban environment. The session on June 14 will be guided by acupuncturist and Tai Chi specialist Ursula de Almeida Goldfarb of Tao Arts Basel. Interested participants should meet promptly at 10am at the Basilea information point and will be led to the rooftop of a neighboring building.
Daily | 12:00PM – 1:00PM | Slow Walk | Isabel Lewis
The public is invited to use the Messeplatz to practice a collective choreography of slow and silent walking amidst the frenetic activities of socializing, comings and goings that occur outside of the fair. Using a slowed-down but otherwise non-stylized walking movement we are challenged to take time to enter into a reflective state bringing attention to breath, presence, and heterogeneous temporality. Interested participants can meet Isabel Lewis at the Basilea information point for a short introduction on Carolyn Dinshaw’s notion of the “queerness of time” at the start of the hour. The end of the hour will be signaled by a prominent percussive aural cue. The Slow Walk can be spontaneously joined at anytime.
1:00PM – 2:00PM | In Conversation
Wednesday | Daniel Häni and Isabel Lewis
Daniel Häni – The Basic Income film director, entrepreneur, co-founder of the Basel culture and coffee house unternehmen mitte
Isabel Lewis – Basilea Artist
Born 1966 in Bern, Häni is an entrepreneur, co-founder of the Basel culture and coffee house «unternehmen mitte» and co-initiator of the Swiss popular initiative «For an unconditional basic income» which launched a referendum in 2016 and triggered a worldwide media response. His artistic work appears under the label “First World Development.” Häni joins artist Isabel Lewis to discuss his work and film The Basic Income.
Thursday | The New Story: Creative Practices In Journalism
Ingrid Burrington – Writer, artist, author of Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure.
Serena Danna – Managing editor in chief for the Italian edition of Vanity Fair.
Marisa Mazria Katz – Journalist, Eyebeam Editorial Producer and Kickstarter Fellow.
With the slow erosion of boundaries and the opening of opportunities for journalists and artists to blend information practices and aesthetics, we are seeing new forms of what constitutes a story, as well as new applications, both responding to and helping to build local and global communities. This hybridized form of art practice has led to a cross-pollination of methods, creating more robust and necessary new forms of investigation and reporting. This is particularly true when it comes to networks representing connections between physical infrastructure or information sources or institutions. These complex objects are not only products of human design, but sources of real power that can be questioned.
Eyebeam ensures artists are at the center of the invention and design of our shared future.
The Brown Institute for Media Innovation is a collaboration between Columbia University and Stanford University, designed to encourage and support new endeavors in media innovation.
1:00PM – 2:00PM | Conversations on Messeplatz
Friday | Self-Construction, Self-Governance
Santiago Cirugeda – Santiago Cirugeda is the founder of Recetas Urbanas, a design and advocacy collective of architects, lawyers and social workers. The collective, known for self-built projects that rely on local participation to complete mobile structures using locally sourced, second and third-hand materials. Activating different areas of urban reality, their projects are at the same time highly functional, legally provocative, and exploit the legalities surrounding the occupation of public space.
David Juarez – David Juarez is an architect and founding member of Straddle3, a multidisciplinary collective that works on urban-related projects based on an open source philosophy. His work include the transformation of vacant lots and buildings into community spaces, houses built out of recycled materials, public parks co-designed and built with their future users and digital platforms and software tools for collaborative urban development. He is the co-founder of the Arquitecturas Colectivas network.
Patti Anahory – Patti Anahory is an architect and designer with a Masters in Architecture degree from Princeton University. Between 2009 and 2012, she served as Founding Director of CIDLOT, a multidisciplinary applied research center at the University of Cabo Verde addressing the dynamics of settlement, urban growth and development. In 2011 she co-founded XU: Collective, an interdisciplinary collective, proposing a critical understanding of urban dynamics, architecture, environmental and inter-media studies.
Moderator: Baharak Tajbakhsh – Baharak Tajbakhsh is a Basel-based architect and cultural policy maker. From 2014 to 2016, Tajbakhsh represented the Department of Cultural Affairs in Basel, coordinating numeral architectural projects, such as the new Natural History Museum and City Archive and the renovation and conversion of the Kaserne building to a cultural center. Following her training in architecture at TU Kaiserslautern, she relocated to Basel in 2009 where she developed urban development and building projects with Bachelard Wagner Architekten, Philippe Cabane Urban Strategien Basel, IBA Basel and Pedrocchi Meier Architekten, among others.
Can we formulate architecture as a platform for a public inquiry? And, if so, how would this question be defined collectively? Baharak Tajbakhsh leads a conversation in which architects Patti Anahory and David Juarez together with architect Santiago Cirugeda discuss the active role we have as citizens to intervene, reflect upon and transform a given environment.
Saturday | On Wastelands and Mineral Rights
Anna Minton – Anna Minton is a regular contributor to the Guardian and Reader in Architecture at the University of East London. She is the author of Big Capital: Who is London for? (Penguin 2017) and Ground Control: Fear and happiness in the 21st century city (Penguin 2009/12).
Emily Scott – Emily Eliza Scott is an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, and former park ranger whose work centers on art that engages pressing (political) ecological issues, often with the intent to actively transform real-world conditions. Currently a postdoc in the architecture department at ETH Zurich, she will begin a joint professorship in the history of art & architecture and environmental studies at the University of Oregon in fall 2018.
Manuel Herz – Manuel Herz is an architect based in Basel, Switzerland. His award winning projects include the Synagogue of Mainz, a museum extension in Ashdod, Israel, as well as housing and office buildings and art spaces in Germany, France and Switzerland. Herz was the curator and architect of the National Pavilion of the Western Sahara at the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2016, the first time that a refugee nation has been represented at the Venice Biennale.
Moderator: Lara Almarcegui’s – A champion of neglected and forgotten sites, Lara Almarcegui’s work carefully catalogues and highlights a particular location’s tendency towards entropy. Working at a time of widespread urban renewal in Europe, Almarcegui reflects upon the continent’s built histories and extractive relationship with the land, and has even worked towards these sites’ legal protection. As Spain’s representative to the 55th Venice Biennial, she filled the interior of the pavilion with massive piles of building rubble similar to those used during its construction.
What happens to an extraction site once it is no longer of use? And, who is responsible for its development and its return to the community? Experts Anna Minton, Emily Scott and Manuel Herz join artist Lara Almarcegui in a panel that invites us to reflect upon the decision-making and journey behind the transformation of a green area into a wasteland.
Sunday | Techne Techno Tech
Isabel Lewis – Trained in literary criticism, dance, and philosophy, Isabel Lewis’ work takes on many different formats: from lecture-performances and workshops to music sessions, parties, installations, and what she calls “hosted occasions.” She has created works around topics such as open source technology and dance improvisation, social dances as cultural storage systems, collaborative creative formats, future bodily techniques, and rapping as embodied speech acts. Lewis is Berlin-based, born in the Dominican Republic and raised on a man-made island off the coast of southwest Florida.
Claire Tancons – Claire Tancons is a curator and scholar invested in the postcolonial discourse and practice of the politics of production and exhibition with a focus on performance. Tancons has charted a distinct curatorial and scholarly path in performance, inflecting global art historical genealogies with African diasporic aesthetics as well as decentring and othering curatorial methodologies as part of a wider reflection on global conditions of cultural production. Over the last decade, she has curated biennials such as Gwangju Biennale (2008), Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008), Cape Town Biennial (2009), Biennale Bénin (2012) and the Göteborg Biennial (2013). She is currently a curator for Sharjah Biennial 14 (2019).
Catherine Wood – Catherine Wood is Senior Curator of International Art (Performance) at Tate Modern. She is currently planning the next Hyundai commission for the Turbine Hall with the Cuban artist, Tania Bruguera (opening 2018). Wood was instrumental in planning and installing the opening displays for Tate Modern’s new Blavatnik Building, with a focus on performance and film in the Tanks, and, with Achim Borchardt-Hume, co-curated the Rauschenberg retrospective at Tate Modern in 2017. Wood initiated and co-curated, with Andrea Lissoni and Isabella Maidment, Tate Modern’s annual Live Exhibition in the Tanks, featuring Fujiko Nakaya and Isabel Lewis (in 2017) and Joan Jonas and Jumana Emil Abboud (2018).
Moderator: Andrea Lissoni – Andrea Lissoni, PhD, is Senior Curator, International Art (Film) at Tate Modern, London, where he curated the Hyundai Turbine Hall Commission 2016 Anywhen, by Philippe Parreno and, more recently, the expanded exhibition Joan Jonas. He is the co-curator – with Andrea Bellini – of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement The Sound of Screens imploding, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, 2018.
This panel brings together scholars and curators with artist Isabel Lewis in a discussion of her inquiry into the meaning of contemporary rituals of gathering. Lewis’ contribution to Basilea is series of public workshops that assemble and interweave a selection of techniques from contemporary dance, performance, moving meditation and Parkour, into a hybrid new bodily praxis.
Daily | 2:00PM – 3:00PM | Activating the Messeplatz, Sonically | Isabel Lewis, Colin Hacklander
Activating the Messeplatz, Sonically is a site-specific score by composer and drummer Colin Hacklander performed by Tarren Johnson, Marquet K. Lee, Flora Kountouriotis, Zuzanna Ratajczyk, Lea Kieffer, Jella Dehn, Michael Helland, and Zinzi Buchanan. Through sound-based interaction with the surrounding objects, architecture and space, the performers pursue sonic activation of the Messplatz through physical production and also activation through awareness as they investigate unique instances of reverberation, electromagnetic fields, and ‘sonic givens.’ The result is an embodied, interpretational, event-based composition that cultivates attentive listening through various auditory modalities in a public context for both performers and observers. Isabel Lewis has developed an accompanying set of simple instructions for heightened reception of Hacklander’s sonic activation. All interested participants should gather at the Basilea information point at 2pm to receive instruction.
3:00PM – 4:00PM | Open Space | Urban Methodologies | In Conversation
Monday | Open Space
Tuesday | Open Space
Wednesday | Urban Methodologies with Recetas Urbanas | Santiago Cirugeda
Led by architect Santiago Cirugeda, Recetas Urbanas is working with volunteers to collectively design and build a multi-purpose civic structure, using locally sourced and second-hand materials. Participants learn from and teach each other through collective exchange and collaboration.
Thursday | In Conversation: Smell-researcher Sissel Tolaas and Isabel Lewis
Lewis and Tolaas speak about Tolaas’s work with urban space. Tolaas has often worked with the likes of architects, environmentalists, and even commercial companies to create “smellscapes” of different cities, including Berlin, Paris, Shanghai, Mexico City, Singapore, Stockholm. She’s been doing this since the early 2000s and already has smell profiles of 52 cities in her library. Altogether, she has a collection of more than 7,000 scents from various projects in her Berlin laboratory. When asked if it would be possible with eyes closed to navigate one’s city Tolaas responded, “Yes and in a very sophisticated way. We are equipped with amazing software that helps us navigate, understand, and communicate with the world.”
Friday | Urban Methodologies with Recetas Urbanas | Santiago Cirugeda
Led by architect Santiago Cirugeda, Recetas Urbanas is working with volunteers to collectively design and build a multi-purpose civic structure, using locally sourced and second-hand materials. Participants learn from and teach each other through collective exchange and collaboration.
Saturday | Open Space with Anna Minton
Sunday | Open Space with Claire Tancons
Daily | 4:00PM – 5:00PM | Parkour Focus | Isabel Lewis, Arvo Losinger
Led by Arvo Losinger from ParkourOne. Open invitation for people curious about Parkour will be introduced to the practice through basic exercises that highlight important core principles. Parkour is a bodily practice that, in Isabel Lewis’ view, forms specific and intimate relations with urban space. Lewis will gather the public at the Basilea information point to introduce her take on the practice, drawing connections to the notions of Jane Bennet’s “thing power” and Donna Haraway’s “making oddkin” and “cultivating the capacity to respond.” Participants can wear regular street attire.
Daily | 5:00PM – 7:00PM | Urban Flourishing Workshop | Isabel Lewis, Colin Hacklander
In this workshop participants enter into Isabel Lewis‘ practice with a focus on public expressions of care and sociability and opportunities to listen in an expanded sense — to sounds, voices, to the vibrations of urban material: urban lives and nonlife. Lewis incorporates influences from dance, performance, active listening practices and Parkour in a hybrid new bodily praxis developed over the last months with collaborator Colin Hacklander and Basel locals that the artist calls “urban flourishing.” It is a practice of attunement for the body that suggests alternative modes of engagement with our built environment than those otherwise proposed to us in today’s highly regulated and standardized forms of urban existence. Please meet at the Basilea information point at the start of the hour.
Thursday & Friday | 6:00PM – 7:00PM | Stochastic Activation: Basler Trommeln
At the closing of the daily activities on the Messeplatz composer and drummer Colin Hacklander presents an original score made for multiple Basel drum “cliques,” engaging the centuries-old tradition of Swiss Rudimental Drumming and its unique Basel-born iteration. Participating Fasnacht drummers gather and then spread throughout the area evincing the specific sonic identities of the Messeplatz within a stochastic composition of individual drum hits before reconvening to present traditional drumming from their repertoire. Basel drumming appears in Lewis’ contribution to Basilea as one of the locally occurring physical practices that for Lewis offers the opportunity to reflect upon traditional and contemporary forms of togetherness and kinship between human and nonhuman agents.
Thursday | Colin Hacklander and Drum Clique Muggedatscher
Friday | Colin Hacklander and Drum Clique Schnurebegge
Monday & Tuesday | 7:00PM – 8:00PM | Stochastic Activation: Basler Trommeln
At the closing of the daily activities on the Messeplatz composer and drummer Colin Hacklander presents an original score made for multiple Basel drum “cliques,” engaging the centuries-old tradition of Swiss Rudimental Drumming and its unique Basel-born iteration. Participating Fasnacht drummers gather and then spread throughout the area evincing the specific sonic identities of the Messeplatz within a stochastic composition of individual drum hits before reconvening to present traditional drumming from their repertoire. Basel drumming appears in Lewis’ contribution to Basilea as one of the locally occurring physical practices that for Lewis offers the opportunity to reflect upon traditional and contemporary forms of togetherness and kinship between human and nonhuman agents.
Monday | Colin Hacklander and Drum Clique Schnurebegge
Tuesday | Colin Hacklander and Drum Clique Naarebasch