Series of meetings: living in claustrophilia

MARIANNE BURKHALTER CHRISTIAN SUMI.

Exhibitions and installations. An ephemeral research

In conversation with Roula Matar

Series of meetings organised by LéaV-Ensa Versailles, the Camondo Paris – MAD school and the Swiss Cultural Centre. Under the direction of Claire Hoffmann, Alexis Markovics and Annalisa Viati Navone.

As places outside the usual conditions of ‘our daily lives’, exhibitions invite us to take new risks, to experiment with pioneering technologies. Exhibitions often have an ephemeral character, and a very limited duration. As an architectural studio, the Atelier Marianne Burkhalter Christian Sumi, based in Zurich, not only works on the construction of spaces, but also imagines more ephemeral mises-en-espaces, activations, installations and performances that bring in the notions of time and movement.

During the exhibition Gotthard Landscape – The Unexpected View at the 2014 Venice Biennale, the Atelier Marianne Burkhalter Christian Sumi (with Christophe Girot, ETH Zurich) staged the landscape of transport across the Gotthard by depicting these movements with ‘point clouds’ and rendering unobstructed and impossible views through videos and sound installations.

The performance Space / Movement / Sound, 2022 (in collaboration with Luca Burkhalter), takes over the shell space of a building in Goeschenen designed by the Atelier Marianne Burkhalter Christian Sumi for a collector, which is to house the works The Collectors House by the Belgian artist Hans op de Beck and Ray by the Indian artist Subodh Gupta. An entanglement between the space of architecture transformed into a theatre, the staging and the performance: three ephemeral metamorphoses for which the Atelier collaborated with the artists involved, playing on the animation of spatiality through the movement of bodies and sound energy.