In the last months Daniel Aschwanden and Conny Zenk developed a research practice with refugees in the Café VOZO, a communication space run together by students, artists and refugees located in the Red Cross Camp Zollamtsstrasse, which is inhabited by more than 1200 refugees. This research practice will be further developed in the Choreographers’ Venture. In the centre of this work is the endeavour to make contact, initiate exchange and establish a dialogue through forms of story telling. How can artistic practice contribute to a complex social situation between racist defence mechanisms and humanistically defined hospitality, without getting trapped into linear politicisation or helper’s syndrome?
Our individual and collective processes will be initiated in a publicly accessible urban space, which we will shape into a home base according to our demands. Tours through the city guided by refugees, daily inputs by experts in theory and practice, guest musicians and highlights of our own explorations and approaches will shape our flexible daily agenda. In the second week of the Choreographers Venture we will publicly perform our material on selected evenings.
Daniel Aschwanden proposes various experiences in the fields of body, improvisation, interventions in urban spaces and performative city tours. Conny Zenk works in the scopes of generative live visualisation, interaction with digital gadgets and application of mobile projections of all kinds in white cubes, black boxes as well as in urban spaces. Together they developed specific translations and dramaturgies based on their long-time collaboration.
Storytelling, dancing, self-expression, projections are the media of a trans-disciplinary practice aiming at generating new impulses in up-to-date discourses around topics of migration and integration. Smart phones and their intimate use in daily life, are an important reference point as well as archives and social media apps serving as cornerstones for life stories.
Daniel Aschwanden †Conny Zenk
