Co-creation: a glimpse into projects between Switzerland and South America

During a tour in South America with her company Antipode Danse Tanz, Swiss choreographer and dancer Nicole Morel found herself interested in brick buildings, especially the works by Colombian architect Rogelio Salmona. The material then became an inspiration for a new project, which she’s now developing with Colombian composer and sound artist Violeta Cruz. This process-oriented project is the first creative chapter of the project called ‘B R I C K S’, which will premiere at the end of 2025. The co-creation focuses on the properties of bricks as building units in space, and more broadly their materiality, their vibration, and their roughness. Violeta creates electro-acoustic music for the choreography and Nicole interacts with movements to produce sounds. The show should count on a group of dancers who would part from Violeta’s music, Nicole’s choreography, and their own interactions with the bricks.

+ Read an interview with Nicole Morel and Lea Hobson about Antipode’s tour in South America

Artists and researchers Denise Bertschi (Switzerland) and Pedro Zylbersztajn (Brazil) have been working through similar methodologies and around like-minded themes, such as ideas of consumption and exhaustion, legacies of colonialist expropriation and its monocultural ideologies, besides the infrastructures of export and displacement. So, when Pedro went on a research trip to Switzerland in 2023, they found a connection between them. This first encounter resulted in the project ‘Export Quality Poetry’, an investigation around the same issues they had been working on, now in dialogue with the artists’ countries and their intertwined histories. During the process, they set off to a rewilded eucalyptus plantation near São Paulo, owned by the world’s largest pulp production company Suzano, to research and film the area. This investigation unfolded into a film and a book, presented at the exhibition ‘Spatial Convers(i)or’ at CAN – Centre d’art Neuchâtel in Switzerland.

In 2021, artists tobibi bienz (Switzerland) and Victoria Papagni (Argentina) started collaborating in an online residency and in the virtual event ‘Segundas Intenciones’. This was followed by an in-person residency, in late 2022, when tobibi embarked to Buenos Aires. Combining their artistic practices (visual and electronic arts, performance, and social activism), the pair conducted their research in labs, field trips, and 3D print studios. The idea was to deconstruct our anthropocentric perception through inter-species technological collaboration – mainly working with Blaptica dubia cockroaches, native to Argentina. The collaboration continued during Victoria’s residency in Basel, and finally in a co-creation project. ‘Fears & Affections’ combines their artistic languages, the themes they have researched over the years and, naturally, cockroaches. Presented in Buenos Aires and Zurich, the work is a mix of performance and installation, created by the duo, though – one might say – choreographed by the insects.

+ Read more about ‘Fears & Affections’

During a residency in Brazil, Swiss-based visual artist Ishita Chakraborty immerged herself into the culture of indigenous communities from Pará, mainly working with tapestry and ceramics, as well as learning from their spiritual and ecological knowledge. She deeply connected with her coach, indigenous artist-activist Vandria Borari, and the duo continued their collaboration in a co-creation. The ongoing project is a living lexicon, embodying transdisciplinary research centred on river ecology across the Brazilian Amazon, Switzerland, and Sundarbans Forest, India. The idea is to examine the river as a biopolitical entity bearing the scars of the transatlantic slave trade, illicit mining, and rising sea levels. For communities in the Amazon or in Sundarbans Forest, rivers are living beings. Therefore, the duo wishes to examine the changing ecology of those waters that have been the source of life for hundreds of years but are facing the threat of human action. Finally, they intend to create a future glossary that embraces all inhabitants, human and non-human, in evolving planetary narratives.

Musicians and activists Felinto (Brazil) and Simon Grab (Switzerland) paired up in 2022 for a residency at São João, an independent programme north of Rio de Janeiro. The estate currently operates as an ecological farmer and artist community, yet the property harbours historical traumas and traces of the country’s slavery period. ‘The Gap’ explored the unspoken stories and sounds of the black diaspora. Later on, the duo continued their collaboration in a co-creation project under the same title, that confronted the colonial imagery at São João: decorative arts, domestic utensils, photographs, furniture, architecture. The idea was to search for the farm’s history, it’s oppressive past and what was forbidden and unspoken within this context. During this time, Felinto and Grab articulated a network of ritual, symbolic, and material sound and performative actions to debate colonial trauma.

+ Read more about ‘The Gap’

For his residency in the Brazilian Amazon, Swiss visual artist and designer Alex Amir Khan continued his research on rubber and its traditional techniques. During this period, he connected with Brazilian artist and designer Katia Fagundes (an artisan from Da Tribu design), with whom he developed the co-creation ‘HaveaHub’. The ongoing project aims to explore and promote the potential of wild Amazonian rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) and to serve as an interface for intercultural and transcultural exchange, focusing on the artistic, investigative, and experimental aspects of rubber. The duo intends to work on Katia’s property in Cotijuba Island in Belém, Pará, where they can research, create new artworks, and promote community outreach.

+ Read an interview with Alexander Amir Khan in our Guide to Residencies in South America 2024

In 2022, Argentinian artist Cinthia de Levie travelled to Switzerland to research on the skeleton of Jacob Kaerrer at the Anatomical Institute of Basel. Connecting with Swiss artist Franziska Baumgartner (who later spent a semester in in Buenos Aires), the duo developed a co-creation around the Medical Collection of the University of Zurich to explore how this archive can be activated, transformed, embodied and transferred into a contemporary context. The collection primarily focuses on medical instruments and equipment for diagnosis and therapy, but the artists are particularly interested in objects that are related to or represent the female body and its internal aspects. Learning from feminist, non-anthropocentric, and alternative medical theories, the ongoing project aims to reflect on the artists’ body in relation to the collection and create new objects, devices, and practices that allow them to connect with their corporality and to come into equal contact with others without dominance and power relations.

Photographers Juanita Escobar, from Colombia, and Luca Zanetti, from Switzerland, have known each other for a decade and collaborated on several projects. For this co-creation project, they joined forces to document the overlooked Orinoco region in Colombia, focusing on the lower base of the Meta River and its habitants. Their ongoing project looks to craft an ethnographic, historical, and geographical portrait of the Orinoco savannas, aspiring to narrate the stories of this land, to underscore the urgency of its preservation and comprehension. The idea is to create a cartography of the region’s cultural and natural landscape, and the outcome of the research (photographs, texts, and maps) should be published online.

During a residency at KIOSKO Galería in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, Swiss visual artist Marion Tampon-Lajariette started exchanging with Bolivian architect and performer Iván Cáceres. Soon they developed a co-creation project gathering different perspectives on the historical, political, and cultural dimensions of water. During the process, they were also inspired by traditions and mythical characters that are able to embody these different narratives. As a prelude to their co-creation in progress, inspired by traditions and speculations about alpine and Andean waters, last July the artists opened the exhibition ‘Eaux calmes du lait’ (The calm waters of milk) at Espace Kugler in Genève. They presented two videos made on the high Andean plateaus, as an echoing diptych: one is a ritual for the vanished waters of Lake Poopo with a group of indigenous women assembled by Marion; and the other is a dreamlike exploration written and performed by Iván on the arid slopes of the sacred mountain of Illimani at an altitude of over 5,000 metres.

Artist duos Igor Cardellini and Tomas Gonzalez, from Switzerland, and Marina Quesada and Paula Baró, from Argentina, have been collaborating since 2018. Coming from different practices, they co-founded in 2020 the Colectivo Utópico with the Brazilian duo Rita de Aquino and Felipe de Assis. Within this frame, they have developed two performative formats conceived as participatory devices, alternative understandings of the way we live in the world today, and the relationships with others that it implies. In February 2023, while working on new and local version of their work ‘Performance telling’ for the FIBA Festival in Buenos Aires, they started conceiving ‘This Is a Trap’, a performance led by the two duos, in a wink to William Watson’s writings on the looming demise of capitalism. The work, whose first actions premiered in Switzerland in July 2024, in conversation with other artists, builds on their investigation on the way our North-South societies are shaped by past and present utopias.