Grenzgang, Basel Academy of Art and Design

The research project “Grenzgang – Artistic Investigations on Perception and Communication of Space in a Trinational Border Area” was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and combined Lucius Burckhardt’s promenadological approach with diverging artistic research methods, in particular with regard to performance, installation, improvisation, audio, drawing and video. Members of the Grenzgang project team applied divergent methods such as these to various walks, each designed according to predefined rules and conducted individually or in groups, and tested the consequences of these methods on their own, individual perception of space. The project was accompanied by workshops with external researchers (Hanna Stippl, Markus Ritter, Fred Frith, Francesco Carreri, Christine Heil, Bernadett Settele, Elke Bippus and Flavia Caviezel) that opened up the team’s internal discussion to a wider audience. The project provisionally concluded with the Grenzgang research platform at the Salon Mondial on the Campus der Künste (Campus of the Arts), which presented a selection of evaluations and potential implementations for public discussion.

Grenzgang offers an artistic approach to historico-cultural, sociological or urban planning-related explorations of the trinational border area around Basel. The project’s geographical point of departure is the Campus der Künste in Münchenstein/Basel’s Dreispitz district. From here, the Grenzgang project examined the perception of urban and border areas and their boundaries in the border triangle area (Switzerland, France, Germany).

The Grenzgang project pursued goals at various levels: On the one hand, the fundamental question of how we perceive space was linked to the question of what specific characteristics demarcate the trinational border area around Basel. on the other hand, at the disciplinary level, the project was designed to demonstrate the genesis of knowledge in artistic research and transpose it from artistic research into an art-based education constituting epistemic practice.

“Grenzgang – Artistic Investigations on the Perception and Communication of Space in a Trinational Border Area” was conducted as an externally funded project, with funding provided by the SNSF, at the Institute for Art and Design Education | HGK | FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, in cooperation with the FHNW Academy of Music (HSM).

Duration:
1 January 2014 to 31 December 2015

Team:
Daniel Brefin, Amadis Brugnoni, Corinne Hasler, Simone Etter, Beate Florenz, Markus Schwander. Beate Florenz and Markus Schwander served as project managers for this project.

Preparations are underway to incorporate this project into a database

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