In her videos and installations, English artist Elizabeth Price creates digital environments, in which different layers of a history determined by technological change are interwoven. Immaterial and sensory, she designs digital architectures that define discursive and immersive spaces, profoundly renewing the experience of moving images.

In her lecture HERE WE ARE, the concise nature of the initial statement ‘here’ may give way to a textured complexity that entails contradictions. The artist will explore some of these in formal, social and political terms. In addition to the extracts from recent videos, Elizabeth Price will figuratively convey the audience into the hard-drive of her computer, to trace the flows of the thousands of images and artefacts that are convened in the editing software.

The film program is organized by the Chair of Art in Space and Time, Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich.

14:00

Introduction by Jonathan Pouthier:

“Dark Screen: Between Transparency and Opacity”

14:30-16:00

Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva

14:30

Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva,

“Ancestral Clouds, Ancestral Claims” 2023, 49 min.

15:30

Q&A with the audience

16:00-16:30 Break

16:30

Introduction to Elizabeth Price

“Elizabeth Price, User Group Disco”, 2009, 15 min.

“Elizabeth Price, The Woolworths Choir of 1979”, 2012, 20 min.

17:30-18:00 Break

18:00

Lecture by Elizabeth Price: “HERE WE ARE”

Q&A with the audience

A drift into the increasingly unknown, Protozone18: Unfamiliar Evermore occupies a space between recognition and estrangement, fantasy and absurdity — being both in the moment and outside of time. Our present is fracturing, and here, at Shedhalle, the Protozone Series is coming to an end. We want to sit with this moment, with both its precarity and fantasy, not knowing what will come next.

As the fifth and last Protozone curated by Michelangelo Miccolis, Unfamiliar Evermore is a loving farewell, a multi-format program including performance, film, installation and conversation. The program shifts from high to low intensity, unfolding as a living process of exhibition-making and collaborative exchange, while tending to the evolution of relationships and working processes.

The artistic processes in Protozone18 are rooted in performance and adopt film as one of its extensions. Through acts of speech, movement, and exchange, the participating artists engage in practices of resistance, refuge, and invention. They dismantle and reassemble language through utterance and gesture, allowing it to reflect the contexts we inhabit while opening up alternative possibilities. Language, or its lack, becomes a tool to resist entrenched norms, proposing new systems of meaning and interaction.

Ivan Cheng, Kris Lemsalu and Joanna Ulfsak focus on personal identity, autonomy, and representation, presenting works that amplify the performative construction of the self, to challenge traditional notions of authenticity and blur the boundaries between reality and performance.

Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Army of Love (Ingo Niermann + Frédérique Vivet), and Eglė Budvytytė emphasize collective practices that reimagine community within artistic, social, as well as posthuman frameworks. Encounters play a central role in these works, not only between artists but with participants or the natural environment as well. These projects evolve through workshops, collective practices and symbiosis, inviting audiences or the environment to actively shape the collaborative processes at play.

This program reflects our ongoing commitment to collaboration and the exploration of new artistic frameworks even and especially when the future is unknown and the present feels unfamiliar.

PROGRAM

Hi-Intensity
Friday, 14 March
open 18-22h

18:00 Screening Eglė Budvytytė, Songs from the compost: mutating bodies, imploding stars (2022)

19:00 Performance Ivan Cheng: Nowadays (2025)

20:00 Performance Kris Lemsalu & Gregor Kulla: Old Piano (2024)

Saturday, 15 March
open 14-20h

14:00 Screening Eglė Budvytytė, Songs from the compost: mutating bodies, imploding stars (2022)

14:30 Film Premiere Ingo Niermann & Frédérique Vivet, Falling in Love with the World (2025)

17:00 Talk with Louise O’Kelly & Michelangelo Miccolis

18:00 Performance/Sharing by Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome

19:00 Screening: Inchoate Buzz (2022), a film by Leah Walker, conceived and commissioned by Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome

Lo-Intensity
Sunday, 16 March to Sunday, 11 May
open every Saturday 14-20h & every Sunday 14-18h

The artistic processes in Protozone18 are rooted in performance and adopt film as one of its extensions. Video-installations related to the performances will remain in the space throughout the Lo-Intensity Phase until 11th of May.

95th Anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne at the Château d‘Ouchy

HD film, 10 minutes, 2018

The film shows a performance in a room that was witness to a historical moment. It served as the conference room for the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, in which Kurdistan was partitioned into four parts. Today the room is a suite in a 4-star hotel in Lausanne. The artist enters the space blindfolded (without having previously seen it) and attempts to oriented herself. Since the performer is deprived of her sight, the spectator’s vision is intensified, creating an opportunity for multiple spaces and levels of reality to be present at the same time.

Masa, 2015

The work “Masa” (engl: table) refers to the Treaty of Lausanne, which was signed in Lausanne in 1923. It redrew the borders of Turkey and Greece and also distributed Kurdistan between Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The treaty amounts to a disenfranchisement of Kurds and Armenians. “Masa” deals with the places and objects connected to this Treaty. In 2008 the Federal Council Pascal Couchepin gave the table on which the peace treaty was signed as a gift to Turkey.

After extensive research the artist decided to produce a replica of the original table and to offer it as a gift (back) to Switzerland. In 2015 the first action was organized in front of the Palais de Rumine in Lausanne. In 2016 the action was repeated in Bern in front of the Swiss Parliament.

– ⁠Start at 6 pm.

– ⁠The table will be exhibited

– Presentation of the film ‘95th Anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne at the Château d’Ouchy’ (10 min).

– Conversation with Mîrkan Deniz and the two authors, Yasmin Afschar (art historian and curator) and Matthieu Jaccard (art historian and architect).

– Food & Drinks

The Institute for Scene Experiments is a fictional institution devoted to the investigation, production and dissemination of scenes. ISE assembles groups of performers and technicians to analyse, deconstruct and reconstitute elements of cinematic scenes for camera, exploring alternative modes of staging narratives, framing, sound, and light. ISE aims to reflect on the film crew as a social form, engaging in the generativity and potentialities of scenes independent of plot, development and conclusivity, through formal techniques as well as collective authorship, ‘open rehearsal’ and collective editing.

Concert

by WAT TAKLAEW

– at 20:00 (40mins)

WAT TAKLAEW aka Valentina D. Jitsattayakul (1989, Zurich) is an artist and musician. She studied Sociology and Social Anthropology before completing her Master in Fine Arts at HEAD Geneva. Her cross-media works, some of which are created from found objects, explore the tensions between systemic capitalist structures and marginalization, and their relationship to post-migrant identities and spiritual belief systems. Musically, she creates textures with an emphasis on experimental music, combining elements of feedback, tape, field recordings, and various Thai folk instruments.

Drawing inspiration from Thai heritage, the artist’s name holds significance as ‚wat‘ translates to ‘temple‘, symbolizing a spiritual connection to the craft. Additionally, ’thakleaw’ derives from a Thai boy name, associated with the concept of militancy.

The debut release ‘Pillars of the Apex,’ on the Zurich-based label Webarchive, takes listeners on a journey of introspection and ethereal exploration. Each track unfolds like a chapter in a story, inviting listeners to explore the depths of their own imagination and delve into the realms of mystical beings.

Fairplay
by Sarai Rose Duke

– from 18:00

all night long, until the dough is gone

Sarai Rose Duke, a German artist, specializes in object-based and edible artworks. Her piece “Fairplay” (2024) demonstrates the principles of reciprocity and solidarity. Through an interactive performance centered on the creation of filled pasta, Duke engages visitors and consumers in a dynamic cycle of participation and exchange. This work not only explores the materiality of food but also underscores the communal and reciprocal nature of shared culinary experiences, cultivating a sense of connection and mutual support among participants.

Solar Capital (2024)

by Hugo de Almeida Pinho

– 18-01:00 (16mins, looping)

Solar Capital is based on the complexities of solar capitalism, its different implications on critical realities and certain politics of visibility and invisibility that shape our historical, iconographic and symbolic relationship with the sun star. Condemning a form of heliocentrism that develops procedures of marginality, appropriation and invisibility involved in ecological politics under the sign of the capitolocene, this film creates a parallel between contemporary forms of connection between humans, energy, technology and the sun.

18:00 – 23:00

Fairplay – cooking & eating pasta in solidarity

with Sarai Rose Duke

20:00

Concert with experimental music

by WAT TAKLAEW

18:00 – 01:00

Solar Capital (2024), video screening (16min)
by Hugo de Almeida Pinho

In the hall, ProtoZone14 hosts the site-specific installation DEAD TIME (Maggie’s Solo) by Cally Spooner. A choreography for a dancer and a cinematographer shot in one single take.

A main focus of Spooner’s project is asking how “performance”—the 24/7 demand to competitively “perform” (well) at all times, whether on social media, at work, or through efficient sleep—has come to govern our social bonds. And, not least, asking how such metric governance might be resisted by adopting other models of time.

In the screening room, Tai Shani’s new film, My Bodily Remains, Your Bodily Remains, And All The Bodily Remains That Ever Were, And Ever Will Be is shown.

The film is a poetic meditation on various historical resistance movements and groups, the spiritual dimensions of anti-supremacism, intersectional queer feminism, communism and revolutionary thinking. It recognises the emancipatory power of love and pleasure as a catalyst for radical change.

The works by Cally Spooner and Tai Shani can be visited for the entire duration of the ProtoZone from 6th of April. The rest of the space and time is dedicated to what we feel is now most urgent: live gathering. We invite you to gather around dance, around poetry, music, excursions, workshops and meals.

This live program starts on the first day of the ProtoZone with Politics of doughs, an itinerant recipe library and a participative meal gathering initiated by Larissa Tiki Mbassi. The process of dough making is the center of each encounter. For the gathering at Shedhalle, Cynthia Mai Ammann and Zoé Nguyen present their visual and sensory approach to « bánh baos » on the 6th of April 13-16h (register here, waiting list).

In the afternoon of the 6th, Alex Baczyński-Jenkins’ performance Federico will be shown for one day only . This is a choreography of desire in the smallest scale, that mobiles affect and sensuality, as a means for a queer archive of touch. It will be repeated three times over the course of the evening.

In May we continue the live-program.

On the 4th of May, Ivo Dimchevs’ METCH invites to different modes of gathering around an artwork and builds gentle forms of trust by generating an intimate community with the audience.

“METCH is a concert exhibition, an auction, an exercise, an excessive production of paintings, an obsessive dialog with the audience and of course the songs… I know many people come to my shows because they like my songs. For good or for bad those people will need to experience or crash with my very complex and unpredictable relationship to theatre, dance, politics, and contemporary art. “ Ivo Dimchev

On the 11th of May, we will re-visit the dialogic formats we developed in January at Shedhalle. This day invites the visitors to speak and listen to each other from their perspective and with their hearts. We will be supported by artist-in-residence Naghmeh Manavi and her writings. Her current works study neuroscience, power structures and political matters at the level of personal daily life. Social and collective acts are considered a performance practice with the collective narrative as the score.

On May 18th, we continue with aLifveforms (fed and card for by JP Raether). JP Raether’s transdisciplinary performative work attends to a group of constructed and constantly evolving identities. These aLifveforms are composed of language, technological skins, digital devices, and Raether’s fleshly body, which they embrace and from whose identity they simultaneously continue to detach themselves more and more. The SelfSisters, or AlterIdentities, are site-specific, colorful beings interwoven with everyday objects, whose works address the constitution of reality through language.

Currently, three active lines are “alive”, dedicated to topics such as reproductive and biotechnologies (Transformella), globalized tourism (Schwarmwesen) or occult substances of contemporary technology (Protektorama). The reproductive lifeline Transformella malor visits each of the 468 “Ikealities” around the world – the local store of the global furniture chain. In the course of her algorhythmic ritual, which is set to last for decades, she has already appeared in Berlin, Bergen, Warsaw, Hamburg and Düsseldorf, among other places. At Shedhalle in May 2024, she will take visitors on a journey to Ikeality in Dietlikon.

In the course of the last weekend of ProtoZone14, Shedhalle hosts an iteration of The Institute for Embodied Creative Practices for the second time. Isabel Lewis has been modelling “The Institute” since 2016 under various names and different formats. The experimental Institute and research center reimagines the format of “institution” and speculates what a cultural/educational institution of the future can and could be. It works toward innovation on the structural, organizational and sensory levels in order to make fertile ground for the emergence of new forms of cultural production, reflection, and critique.

The Institute for Embodied Creative Practices at Shedhalle is co-hosted by Isabel Lewis together with artists and scientists from Zurich as well as international academies. (more info on program and participation coming soon)