A man and a woman in a big embrace. The TV shows a couple dancing in a Hollywood musical. The man and woman attempt to follow suit, but their movements are wooden and their feet leaden, as if under extra gravitational pull. Caught in a web of stereotypes they try again and again, but their perseverance completely robs their dance of the lightness of the original. All that remains is the melancholy cast of failure on their exhausted faces.

The tempting, the deceiving, the fleeting and the oppression of happiness eerily transformed into a theatrical work which cleverly and skilfully applies the language of film and its technology.
A wordless, forceful film with a carefully arranged soundtrack – a miniature work of art
Laudatio for the Basel Film Prize 2011

english translation coming soon

english translation coming soon

The Swiss pavilion at the Expo in Saragossa features the video installation „Unter dem See“ / „Under the Lake“. An eighteen meter long, hanging sail serves as the projection surface. In a completely darkened room the observer finds himself under the projection. From below, you see a large, rather undefined water basin in which a man is swimming. The nature and quality of the water change constantly. The man’s body and skin react to the continuously new surroundings – sometimes relaxed and languorous, then defensive and protective. The images call forth both pleasant and sensuous but also eerie and threatening feelings – thereby making the ambivalent potential of water very perceptible.

The actor Jo Dunkel was asked to improvise a fit of rage. The video material taken of this tantrum was shown to the actor in slow motion. Then he was called upon try to reenact and imitate the video-technically reduced-speed version of his own fit of anger. Because the sound in the slow motion version could not be heard, Jo Dunkel is forced to guess the sounds purely from the movements of the mouth.

Through this experimental transfer his anger seems to become fear, although this was not the intention of the actor.

Full of positive energy and the urge to move forward, this wanderer strides through nature, a pioneer discovering new land, a man on his way into the future. As his happiness increases to euphoria, his gait becomes increasingly heavy. As if in a nightmare, his movements seem to load more and more energy, yet he has almost come to a standstill. Like a running machine that is blocked, at the end it seems he is on the verge of explosion. His energy is not only taking him nowhere, it is slowly turning against him.

The point of departure is a study made by Paul Ekman, researcher of facial expressions, who attempts to categorize human emotional expressions based on facial muscular impulses. In doing so, he investigates the question of which facial expressions are innate - or „natural“ – and which have been influenced by a specific cultural environment. For his research, Ekman isolated 40 individual muscle movements, defining the various facial expressions as the combination of those movements. His descriptions of the separate emotional feelings read like exaggeratedly precise director’s instructions. And that is exactly the way that they are used in this piece.

One views this Garden from above – it consists of six monitors showing flowers as they emerge and plunge when light passes in and around them, accompanied in the background by a crackling sound. The slow, repeated loops project the visual impression of being underwater and fireworks all in one. Tamed marvels of nature, which transform the monitors into deep vessels and the images of the flowers into a seductive play of movement.

Isabelle Zürcher, text in the room at the exhibition in the Kunsthaus Baselland

2007, 1-channel installation, loop: 5′, SD Pal

„Forest“ is projected onto a minimum wall space of 3.5 meters x 2.6 meters. Thus the observer is plunged into the picture. Through a special editing technique the Forest can be perceived in an almost 3-dimensional perspective and seems either to be approaching the observer or retreating from him. Then the clear structures disappear and the eye is forced to focus on a point of reference that will make the image legible.

„You don’t see the forest for the trees – or vice versa: you don’t see trees for all that forest. Composed from three stationary pictures with slightly shifted lines of vision, the forest remains a place as such, with perspectives and points of view intact. At the same time, the laws of depth perception are counteracted, or perhaps newly measured. This calming, predominantly green visual as high as the wall accelerates in an optical staccato into a kind of shimmering revolving motion before it then releases that motion – to become a mossy path, which because of its pixel structure, takes on a picturesquely charming surface.“

Isabelle Zürcher, on the occasion of the purchase by the Kunstkredit Basel

2007, Sound piece for a bricked hotel / in collaboration with Esther Hiepler / voice: Gerd Hiepler / a project by île flottante (Nica Giuliani & Andrea Gsell)

For the «Expansion Sonore» project by île flottante, various buildings in Basle were outfitted with «Expansions» that served as an interface between visitors and the house. With a mobile telephone, the audio texts could be downloaded directly in front of the building. (see below)

After standing empty for a long time, the Sixties Hotel „Steinengraben“ was occupied many times, then emptied out and walled up. Into this situation of stagnation we projected the figure of a pioneer that one could imagine is imprisoned in the building. As text, we have taken monologs from Westerns and altered them slightly. Our pioneer practiced them and then presented them in various stages of emotion.