Co-creation: A showcase of projects between Switzerland and East, West and Southern Africa

Artists Rhona Mühlebach (Switzerland) and Chloë Reid (South Africa) have worked together remotely and in person over several years exchanging feedback and critical writing on the basis of their individual practices as well as more collaborative work. The partnership is based on a shared interest in using fictional and narrative forms to reflect on moments of dissonance between people, objects and non-human living things.

Their long-term project ‘Neither Hideous nor Tedious’ draws its title from The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li, and explores the relationships between mythology and personhood. During remote and in-person work phases, the artists are developing a narrative between them, using the framework of a theatrical backdrop to ‘roll’ the story and collaboration forward.

During a residency in January at Nirox in South Africa, the artists developed a script and series of drawings for an installation-based performance. The open studio featured drawings, notes and a short rehearsal with an accompanying score composed by William Aikman. The final iteration of the project will retain the rehearsal format as a methodology that invites experimentation and consistent reworking. The artists will come together to revisit, adapt and rehearse the material once more in Switzerland in September 2025.

Franco-Swiss architect Quentin Clémence was supported on a research trip in Madagascar in 2022 and following on from this was invited to take part in Tana Design Week. He met Malagasy photographer Rijasolo, and they conceptualised the long-term research project ‘Happy Dreams, Broken Dreams’.

The project focuses on the Antananarivo university campus residence, built by French architect Roland Simounet between 1962 and 1972. Designed to bridge the gap between traditional local techniques and Western modernity, the campus is considered a jewel of the tropical modernist movement. The project retraces the building’s 50 years of existence using archive footage and in-situ reports to create a picture of contemporary Malagasy society.

Over several months in 2024, the partners carried out an in-depth field study together at the site. Quentin took charge of the architectural and heritage aspects (research, surveys, drawings), and Rijasolo produced a photographic report. The results will be a visual production with Rijasolo’s photographs set in dialogue with archive photographs and architectural drawings. These elements will be the subject of a book publication and a photography exhibition.

‘Urban Sotho’ (working title) is musical collaboration between Tshepang Ramoba, a master of South African traditional music from the Bapedi people, and Swiss musician Magda Drozd, who is active in the field of experimental electronic music. Magda was supported on a research trip in Johannesburg in 2023, which informs the departure point for this collaboration.

The project brings together the two artists’ distinct musical worlds: Tshepang brings the rhythms and melodies of Dinaka, characterised by reed pipes and pulse-keeping drums, while Magda contributes her eclectic mix of electroacoustic compositions, incorporating violin drones, orchestral passages, choral melodies, and various experimental techniques.

The artists’ collaborative process centres around a shared passion for experimentation and innovation. Through a fluid approach of regular jam sessions and improvisational exercises, the partners will create new compositions that blend diverse musical styles, sonorities, and approaches.

‘Noyyig Dëk Bi’ (Wolof for pulsation of the city) is a project at the crossroad of art and design by Swiss artist and designer Noemi Niederhauser and Senegalese curator and activist Mamadou Boye Diallo.

The project built on from Noemi’s research trip in Dakar in 2023, and focuses on the craft of smelting recycled aluminium cans in sand moulds. Together with local artisans, the partners developed a series of cast aluminium design objects, and an accompanying short film that traces the history of this casting process interwoven with the stories of the people who practice it today.

They presented the project during Partcours and the Off programme of the Dakar Biennale 2024.

In 2022, Swiss performance artist Yann Marussich was supported on a research trip to Mozambique. This was followed by a tour in 2023 with the aim of initiating a new collaborative project relating to the embodied legacy of the civil war. Ivan Barros is a Mozambican photographer and filmmaker, who has worked extensively with choreographers in the creation of dance films. They developed the project ‘Missing Bodies’, creating six video performances together with six local participants who have each lost a limb as a result of the notorious use of landmines during the war.

The project was developed in 2024 during online exchanges and two intensive creation laboratories in Nacala (northern Mozambique) in June and September. Yann and Ivan worked closely with the participants in both artistic and therapeutic dimensions, creating a space of trust to address the traumas of civil war and loss of a limb. The completed video performances were presented during Maputo Fast Forward, and will be presented in Switzerland at Comédie de Genève in May 2025 as part of Out of the Box: Biennale des Arts inclusifs.

South African electric bassist/composer Carlo Mombelli and Swiss classical percussionist/composer Siegfried Kutterer met in 2017 during Siegfried’s residency in Johannesburg. Since then, they have enjoyed a long-term collaboration developing musical concepts together that combine their individual musical styles.

Their Co-creation project ‘In the End we all Belong’ continues in this vein. Despite the musicians’ musical styles and backgrounds differing in many ways, they share strong commonality in the emotional content of their compositions, identified by suggestive, ritual and meditative repetitive passages and auditory climaxes. The project takes inspiration from Siegfried’s extraordinary collection of instruments and their unique sound, offering unrivalled possibilities of sound modulations, tunings and harmonic and melodic processes.

The musicians are presenting the project in February 2025 at Jazzwerkstatt Bern.

‘Hiving and HUMing’ is a long-term, process-oriented multisensory project by visual artist Dunja Herzog (Switzerland) and beekeeper Thembalezwe Mntambo (South Africa) exploring the relationship between bees, plants and humans. The project extends a collaboration that began during Dunja’s 2022 residency in Johannesburg.

Central to the project is the idea of “swarm logic”, a collaborative methodology for working together with a range of local and international beekeepers, gardeners, and artists to research and cross-pollinate ideas about indigenous and non-extractive approaches to beekeeping and beehive modalities, as well as sound and resonant instruments to tune in to bee vibrations and non-verbal forms of communication.

• Read a story about ‘Hiving and HUMing’ here.