The international group exhibition Aaaand… Scene / Und… Szene marks the beginning of a new programme at Shedhalle Zürich. Borrowing its title from the moment on a film set when a director calls the end of a take in English or the beginning of one in German, the exhibition treats the exhibition space itself as a scene — a stage on which objects, bodies, and narratives come into relation.

At the centre of the exhibition is the introduction of Re-Props — artistic contributions that function simultaneously as artworks and exhibition infrastructure. The participating artists develop modular works — seating structures, display systems, platforms, partitions, and environments — that shape the spatial conditions of the exhibition while remaining open to transformation in future shows. The term is borrowed from theatre and film production, where it refers to reusable stage elements that reappear across different scenes. At Shedhalle, Re-Props are designed to do the same: to travel through the programme, adapting to new contexts and configurations over the coming years.

Rather than treating exhibition architecture as neutral support, these works make visible what usually stays behind the scenes — the structures that hold an exhibition together and determine how it is experienced. An artist’s bench is also a sculpture. A partition wall is also an artwork. The infrastructure of the show is the show.

Aaaand… Scene / Und… Szene therefore acts less as a finished display than as a first staging — the beginning of a long-term experiment that will continue to evolve throughout Shedhalle’s programme.

The Echo-Deck

The Echo Tarot Deck embodies the very idea of reading that characterizes their practice, both Poethical Readings and the Sensing Salon. The deck has been inspired by poethical readings of Ai Ogawa’s poems, in which we use Tarot spreads and Reiki sessions to assemble the meaning of each card as well as of the deck itself. It differs greatly from the traditional tarot decks, not so much in content but in terms of its ethical presuppositions. Instead of a linear trajectory of self-actualization (self-development) represented by The Magician, in the Echo deck, the Major Arcana combine into a complex composition while, in the Minor Arcana, instead of sequentiality (and its sense of development) the cards signal elementality (and its sense of implicancy). Overall the deck foregrounds materiality as transformability, for it allows us to image the ethical, through the inseparability of the emotional, the intellectual, the spiritual, and the corporeal.

Each and every reading, in their view, is informed by other readings that have taken place and also, each and every reading is already (a possible, potential, or virtual) part of readings to come. This is because while Tarot readers may develop their own ways of reading a spread and interpreting a card, these will be already influenced by previous Tarot readings or what she or he may have read in a book or online.twickeln können, diese jedoch bereits von früheren Tarot-Deutungen oder von dem, was sie in einem Buch oder online gelesen haben, beeinflusst sind.

Poethical Readings

Poethical Readings, the initial form of their collaboration, is oriented by the question of how to image ethics with/out the modern subject. The practice experiments with symbolic tools, including astrology, philosophy, palm reading, herbal healing, fake therapy, political therapy, Reiki, and the Tarot. Each session creates a space for a collective reading of an image, which captures the inseparability of the political and ethical dimensions of a personal, a collective, or global situation or question.

Sensing Salon

The Sensing Salon, the studio practice they have designed, expands the image of art beyond objects, events, and discourse to include the healing arts. Through formats that facilitate collaborative study and experiment with practices and tools for reading and healing, the Sensing Salon fosters a form of sociality that attends to our deeply implicated existence.

In Shedhalle, for the first time, the Reading Tools and Echo Seminar are combined:

The Box

The box gathers texts, cards, tools, and other materials used for reading for questions, events, and situations. In the box there are different reading tools available for use. There are Tarot decks, Fake Therapy cards, books on Reiki and Tarot, as well as The Collected Poems of Ai, the book that inspired the Echo Tarot Deck, with instructions on how to read and practice.

The box is available for use during exhibition hours, anyone is welcome to do any kind of reading, practices or experiments. Feel free to bring your own books and tools.

Echo-Seminars

Throughout these almost ten years of practice, the Poethical Readings exposed how one or more of the components of what we call the emotional intrastructure of the subject—namely, fear, guilt, shame, and anger—are at play, behind every question and in the midst of every crisis. Towards gathering a sense of why and how this infrastructure has come to compose the psyche, which is the figuring of interiority assembled by psychoanalysis, we have organized this structured study program, which we call the Echo Seminars. Each major figure of psychoanalysis—Fred, Lacan, Jung, Klein—will be the object of a seminar series, which will be offered as a separate course or as modules of the same course. These will be in person meetings, which will follow the usual format of a seminar, that is, we will assign background readings to be discussed, but the main objective of the meetings is to share our research. This means that, in addition to our analysis of the theorist’s ideas, we will also discuss cases—that is, readings—in the seminar sessions.