Circumstances: For the first time in the city of Zurich, an art-in-architecture project is being put out to tender for a temporary performance festival. The Im Birch school building, designed by architect Peter Märkli, is designed for 700 pupils and is the largest in the city.
Spatial situation: A huge empty gymnasium with a grandstand.
Material and preparation: For several weeks, the janitor collects the paper waste from all the classrooms into two metal, mobile waste containers. An unattended microphone is placed alternately in different corridors of the school building. Pupils approach with curiosity. The recorded snippets of conversation and sounds are edited into a 15-minute audio piece. A wooden box with a player and six headphones.
Procedure: For eight hours, X and Y carefully lay out the paper waste from the metal containers in the gymnasium until almost the entire floor area is covered. The spectators in the stands can listen to the soundtrack and watch the work from there. Then X and Y open a side door of the gymnasium. The audience has to take off their shoes. They enter the area lined with paper waste and leave traces in the fragile arrangement.
Interim consequences: A teacher from the Im Birch school is delighted to discover references to one of her past lessons in the spread-out paper waste. This discovery encourages other teachers present to search for traces of their own lessons.
automatically translated from german
Live-Art, Performancefestival
place: Schulhaus Im Birch, Zürich
KuratorIn: Müller, Victorine; Omlin, Sibylle
Dokumentationstyp: Dokumentation einer Performance/Aktion / Documentation of a performance/action