Portals Next

Partners: Kaserne Basel (Switzerland); National Arts Festival (Makhanda, South Africa); camaguTshawe (Gqeberha, South Africa); Sahyande Theatre (Attappadi, India)

Portals Next aims to become a sustained network of residency structures, connecting to expanding networks of artists and curators attentive to local and global audiences. The 2-year project considers exchange, collaboration and presentation through residency formats within artist-led structures in a discourse mode; a practical mode, and a practice-sharing mode.

500 Hands for the Restitution

Partners: Group50:50 (DRC, Switzerland); Centre d’Art Waza [Lubumbashi, DRC); Collectif d’Art d’Art (Kinshasa, DRC)

500 Hands for the Restitution aims to develop artistic interventions and a series of workshops with young artists and experts in DR Congo and Switzerland that will serve to restore cultural memory and re-socialise repatriated African cultural objects and human remains.

Locus Globus 

Partners: Vaughn Sadie (South Africa); Neil Coppen (South Africa); Ntando Cele (Switzerland/South Africa); Raphael Urweider (Switzerland)

The Locus Globus project is a process led by the four artist partners to facilitate the development of a partnership between the Klein Karoo National Art Festival in Oudtshoorn, South Africa and the Maison du Futur in Bern/Zurich, Switzerland. Working with local artist groups in each context, the project aims to co-develop a range of inclusive and participant-driven research and creative processes which will culminate in community-led programming for the respective multi-disciplinary hybrid festivals.

(RE)SHAPE 

Partners: Work it Out (Switzerland); Fundación Mar Adentro (Santiago, Chile); CHELA (Centro Hipermediático Experimental Latinoamericano) (Buenos Aires, Argentina); Associação Cultural Scala (Maputo, Mozambique); The Art Corner of Tehran (Tehran , Iran); arthereistanbul (Istanbul, Turkey); Tanzhaus Zürich (Switzerland)

(RE)SHAPE is a virtual residency incubator that invites 10 interdisciplinary artists to collaborate in a blind-date match with another artist. (RE)SHAPE questions the nature of virtual collaboration and investigates the expansion of physical space into the virtual realm and vice versa.

Maabara Exchange

Partners: Maabara Initiative (Nairobi, Kenya); Theater Spektakel (Zurich, Switzerland)

Maabara Exchange connects performing arts practitioners and organisations in East Africa and Switzerland through a 2-year programme of exchange activities, enabling an ongoing conversation about how to re-think and re-organise creative collaborations across different cultural environments and art market economies in more equal and sustainable ways. It brings into dialogue the emerging artist-led Maabara Initiative in Nairobi and the international art festival Zürcher Theater Spektakel.

Reading Africa

Partners: Litar Foundation (Zurich, Switzerland); Strauhof Zurich (Switzerland)

This project asks: How do we read and narrate ‘Africa’ – a continent and its cultural diversity? Which postcolonial imaginaries are mapped out and transformed in African literatures? Reading Africa is an open archive exhibition in three parts (2022-2024), organised by Strauhof Zurich and Litar Foundation together with African partners and co-curators. The exhibition trilogy aims to be an intercontinental platform for a long-term dialogue with African and European authors, translators and publishers.

Art in Human Spaces

Partners: Jill Richards (South Africa); Christophe Fellay (Switzerland)

Christophe Fellay, (drummer/composer/sound artists), and Jill Richards (pianist/improviser/sound artist) propose an exploratory, multidisciplinary collaborative project that aims to explore artistic points of view and relationships between Swiss artists who live and practise contemporary art in the context of the so called “Western World”, and South African artists living and working in Johannesburg. The artists are interested to see how these two different realities could permeate each other to form a third reality/context within which new artistic projects/artefacts could emerge. They will engage with a wide range of artistic partners associated with The Centre for the Less Good Idea (Johannesburg), and the Theatre Les Halles (Sierre), La Becque Artistic residency (Geneva), Edhea arts university, as well as other Swiss venues.