Workshops

Friday 5th – Sunday 7th August 2011
Critical Mass / Critical Mess
Performance Workshop with Christoph Draeger (New York / CH)

Wednesday 10th – Friday 12th August 2011
Misuse / Displace – strategies for installation and performance
Performance Workshop with Kate McIntosh (Brussels / New Zealand)

 

Friday 5th – Sunday 7th August 2011

Critical Mass / Critical Mess

Performance Workshop with Christoph Draeger (New York / CH)

Christoph Draeger joined the grassroot movement “Critical Mass” in New York in March 2010 and rides as a white “Ghost Rider” in the bicycle protests almost every Friday. Critical Mass is formed of bicycle activists, who use their rides to fight for more space and fewer cars on the streets of America. The bicycles, painted white and known as “Ghost Bikes”, are anonymously chained to public spaces as “makeshift memorials” for injured cyclists.

On the one hand, the workshop aspires to founding a “Critical Mass” in Zurich, and on other hand aims to situate this within a wider performative context: political activism meets performance art. Aside from this, participants should be motivated to develop, present and document their own public-space performance.

Critical Mass Performance: Wednesday 10th August, 17.00 – 18.00 h

Christoph Draeger was born in Zurich and currently lives in New York. For almost 20 years, he has used photography to explore medial streams of images and omnipresent reporting from sites of horror. He attaches himself to the traces of telegenically processed tragedies and visits sites of bombings, natural catastrophes, accidents and explosions. He depicts these scenes from a spatial and temporal distance, drawing attention to both human transience and the half-life of documentary images in the media age. www.christophdraeger.com

Wednesday 10th – Friday 12th August 2011

Misuse / Displace –
strategies for installation and performance

Performance Workshop with Kate McIntosh (Brussels / New Zealand)

The focus of this workshop with Kate McIntosh is the further development of her artistic research into metaphors. Kate McIntosh will work with the participants both inside and outside, using interactions with objects, materials and spaces to work on strategies to create metaphorical images and actions. In doing so, objects and materials become actual ‘performers’. They are diverted from their intended use and rearranged so that unexpected and unusual semantic relationships are created in every-day spaces.

Kate McIntosh will refer to two of her own works as examples – the stage piece “Dark Matter” and the video installation “De-Placed” (together with Eva Meyer-Keller). The ideas and strategies presented in the work with objects should serve as practical tools and as a basis for further research and work, either in groups or individually.

Zurich audiences discovered Kate McIntosh with her solo performances „All Natural” and “Loose Promise”, her punk band “PONI” and the collaborative piece “Dark Matter”, and she has delighted viewers with her humour, curiosity and strong belief in the individual. The trained dancer, originally from New Zealand, she has developed her own style and works in the liminal areas between theatre, performance and video.

 

Download workshops (PDF, only German)