Co-creation: selected projects 2025

Corsin Gaudenz (Switzerland) and Ahmed Elsawy (Sawi Laila) (Egypt)

The two-part project ‘Between the Lines بين السطور ‘ combines performance and participatory engagement. It features a 30-minute theatre and puppetry performance using movement and storytelling to explore boundary-crossing and children asserting agency. This is followed by a workshop designed for children’s groups — a safe, creative space for reflection, questions, and self-expression through art.

The project aims to create intercultural artistic spaces that enable honest dialogue around taboos, using age-appropriate and culturally sensitive language and aesthetics. Touring two to three locations in Switzerland (mainly non-urban, such as Valais or Central Switzerland) and Egypt (particularly upper Egypt, including rural areas), the project explores how child protection strategies resonate in different contexts. It traces the fragile lines between vulnerability and strength, contributing to global conversations on childhood, education, and the transformative power of performance.

Sawi Laila and Corsin Gaudenz met in Switzerland during Sawi’s performance studies in Sierre, where they quickly connected through a shared belief in theatre as a space for social dialogue and transformation. Coming from Egypt, Sawi’s practice is rooted in shadow play, puppetry, and community-based theatre that addresses themes such as violence, exclusion, racism, borders, and resilience — often in collaboration with schools and NGOs in rural areas. Corsin’s work in Switzerland also engages young audiences through participatory performances like ROSA, which explores war and freedom of expression. In 2025, during his residency in Cairo, Corsin began adapting a Swiss folk tale into Egyptian Arabic and collaborated with Sawi. That moment sparked their artistic partnership — grounded in mutual respect and the desire to co-create across languages, borders, and communities.

Corsin Gaudenz

Ahmed Elsawy (Sawi Laila)

Alan Schmalz (Switzerland) and Louise Dib and Riad Hamed Abdelouahab (Studio Chimbo) (Algeria)

Designed as a conceptual and evolving project, ‘Derja b Derja’ explores the role of staircases in Algiers’ urban fabric and daily life. More than mere passages, these structures function as arteries shaping the city’s rhythms. Approached as artistic objects, public and intimate spaces, and connectors between urban layers, this project unfolds through psychogeography, graphic design, contemporary art, and publishing through a series of three physical publications. 

Alan Schmalz, Louise Dib and Riad Hamed Abdelouahab from Studio Chimbo, met in Algiers while working in the same place. Through their respective artistic practices, they developed a shared sensitivity to what lies at the margins, what emerges and grows there. They are drawn to so-called minor practices and to the messages and philosophies carried by some of these movements. Whether independent cinema, experimental music, literature, or fields such as anthropology, social sciences, or history, their interests have often intersected across these domains, leading them to approach certain questions with a rich and dynamic sense of complementarity. 

Alan Schmalz

Louise Dib and Riad Hamed Abdelouahab (Studio Chimbo)

Christophe Fellay (Switzerland) and Johan Thom (South Africa)

Christophe Fellay and Johan Thom will collaboratively explore and document cave sites in Switzerland and South Africa through performative interventions, using sound and visual media to reveal the unseen histories and latent possibilities of these spaces. The project will focus on natural caves in the Cradle of Humankind and human-made underground structures in the Swiss Alps, treating the sites themselves as primary ‘performers.’ Performances — using percussion, voice, and movement — will create acoustic ‘footprints’ that capture the unique properties of each location. These recordings will be compiled into a multi-channel video and sound installation, immersing visitors in the interplay between sound, space, and memory. The ‘X’ in the title symbolises both amplification and site-specificity, emphasising sound as a tool to locate and magnify hidden dimensions. The project bridges visual and sonic practices, drawing on echo acoustics, performance art, and interdisciplinary methodologies to connect past, present, and future through creative research. 

Johan Thom and Christophe Fellay have collaborated extensively on multiple art projects across Switzerland, South Africa, and internationally. Their notable works include The Minotaur Series (2005), a seven-channel synced video projection with mixed media and performative elements by Fellay, created during Thom’s CRIC/Phlosa residency in Sierre (Switzerland) (November 2004–January 2005). The piece premiered at the Forum d’Art Contemporain in Sierre and was later exhibited at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2006. In 2019, Thom contributed visual elements to the performance series F Sharp Bright Orange in New York, which resulted in a vinyl album released in 2023. Their recent collaboration, Art in Human Space/Listening At The Edge (2022–23), featured a live performance and the video installation Movement in Three Parts (Isandlwana), exhibited at the Pretoria Art Gallery in 2023. 

Christophe Fellay

Johan Thom

Delgado Fuchs (Nadine Fuchs & Marco Delgado) (Switzerland) and Selim Ben Safia (Tunisia)

The project currently under development explores the artists’ choreographic heritages, focusing particularly on folkloric and ritual dances. This is not a patrimonial gesture, but rather a playground and space for reflection, where costumes, bodies, and acts of transmission become living materials to be questioned, reimagined, and transformed.

During the Swiss Dance Days in Zurich in 2024, a candid conversation unfolded between them about their respective artistic contexts. They exchanged perspectives on local realities — constraints, freedoms, and points of friction. Very quickly, the desire to collaborate became evident, not despite their cultural differences, but because of them.

Selim Ben Safia

Delgado Fuchs (Nadine Fuchs & Marco Delgado)

Céline Burnand (Switzerland/Egypt) and Elkin Calderón Guevara and Diego Piñeros García (Colombia/Germany)

The project ‘Fables of the Nile River’ explores the symbolic and ecological role of animals in Egyptian, Colombian and Swiss cultures through a three-week felucca journey from Aswan to Luxor on the Nile River. Combining field research, writing and reinterpretation of fables, and filmmaking, the artists create together with local communities, drawing on oral traditions, local and ecological knowledge, and direct encounters with animals. Each fable links myths and realities from different continents, addressing themes such as power, migration, and human-animal relationships. Inspired by the Vinciane Despret book ‘What would animals say if we asked them the right questions?’, the project, based on travel, listening and collective authorship, reimagines rivers and animals as living archives of connection.

The project team consists of Céline Burnand, Elkin Calderón Guevara and Diego Piñeros García. Their partnership began when they met in 2019 during an artist residency at Villa Ruffieux in Switzerland, organised by Pro Helvetia and the COINCIDENCIA programme. Based on their friendship and an ever-evolving artistic dialogue, the artists have since developed multiple joint projects. In 2021, at the invitation of Diego and Elkin, Céline conducted research at Lugar a Dudas in Cali, exploring local practices related to snakes with Diego’s support. In 2023, Céline and Diego collaborated on Figuras de la Memoria for the Cali International Dance Festival, with the support of Pro Helvetia, where Diego worked as producer and field guide along the Colombian Pacific coast. Meanwhile, Céline and Elkin have maintained an ongoing exchange, meeting frequently in Berlin and, most recently, in Nyon during the premiere of Elkin’s film at the Visions du Réel Festival.

Céline Burnand

Elkin Calderón Guevara and Diego Piñeros García

Ernestyna Orlowska (Switzerland) and Funa Ye (China)

The artists intend to create a video installation project together, where their skills and interests meet and catalyse one another. Their collaborative project aims to explore the lifecycle of MacBooks — from design and production to consumption and disposal — through the lens of waste management practices in China and Switzerland. By juxtaposing the two countries’ approaches, they seek to create a multi-layered narrative that challenges conventional perceptions of waste and sustainability in the global industry. The artists are particularly interested in how products cultivate a lifestyle centred on digital minimalism, and how this intersects with global patterns of extraction, labour, and obsolescence. The work aims to tell a ‘post-utopian myth’ of the MacBook: a speculative, poetic narrative that reveals what remains after the dream of seamless design fades.

Ye Funa and Ernestyna Orlowska met in 2017, when Ye Funa underwent a residency at Stadtgalerie Bern. Pro Helvetia had supported the residency, as well as appointed Ernestyna as Ye Funa’s side local art guide. Ernestyna ended up performing in one of Ye Funa’s video works, which was later exhibited in Shanghai and New York. Since then, the two artists have stayed in touch. They share an interest in crafty art production with a DIY aesthetic. Also, there are both interested in themes such as capitalist production, selfhood, labour, and the hidden infrastructure of logistics in digital networks and the influence it has on the creation of the self.

Ernestyna Orlowska

Funa Ye

Shuyue Miao Zhao (Switzerland) and Cuiamo (Mo) (China)

‘幻月流 Luna Drift’ is a co-creation project between Shuyue Miao Zhao and Cuiamo (Mo), shaped by their respective environments — Zurich and Guangzhou. Through fieldwork, composition, and performance, the project explores how geographic and cultural contexts influence listening and embodied experience. The work unfolds in two phases: first, a remote exchange in which each artist develops sound material in response to their local surroundings; then, a second phase in Guangzhou, where they meet to further transform the material through collaborative performance. Embracing difference and entanglement, the artists seek common ground through music and a shared commitment to sonic experimentation.

Their collaboration is grounded in mutual artistic curiosity and a personal connection that began during Zhao’s 2025 China tour and research trip in Shanghai, which included a pivotal meeting in Hong Kong.

‘We were drawn to each other’s practices through a shared dedication to experimental sound, improvisation, and live performance, as well as a deep interest in how listening is shaped by social, political, and spatial conditions. Driven by a strong desire to collaborate further, we continued our musical exchange remotely and have since developed several ideas for joint projects. At this stage, creating music together remains our top priority.’

– Shuyue Miao Zhao and Mo

Soundcloud

Shuyue Miao Zhao

Cuiamo (Mo)

Nadya Suvorova (Switzerland) and Heidi Jalkh (Argentina)

Material Interactions is a collaborative project by Argentinian designer Heidi Jalkh and Swiss artist-designer Nadya Suvorova that explores how emergent materials can act as expressive, interactive agents. What does it mean for a material to be ‘alive’? The project investigates this question through small kinetic haptic displays that transform active, bio-based materials sourced from labs in Switzerland and Argentina into subtle, responsive mechanisms. Each piece serves as both an interactive sculpture and a research artefact, revealing how materials perform, react, and resist. It also invites intuitive, embodied encounters where matter moves, senses, decays, and fosters engagement. This playful investigation of ‘living’ and ‘life-like’ materials explores their potential influence on design culture.

Heidi and Nadya first connected in Zurich during Heidi’s research trip, ‘Material Design: Focus on Biomaterials,’ where they discovered shared interests in material behaviour, transformation, and interactivity. Heidi was drawn to Nadya’s interactive explorations of material behaviours, while Nadya was intrigued by Heidi’s interest in making materials active through form and her research-based approach to shaping bio-based materials. Soon after, Nadya invited Heidi to the Soft Materials Lab at ETH Zurich, where both immersed themselves in research, exchanging ideas with scientists.

Their exchange deepened around how physical and digital systems can inform each other through material interaction. Later, during Heidi’s workshop ‘IN A SEASHELL’ (2024) in Berlin and Nadya’s ‘Future of Materials’ platform, they continued exploring how their complementary practices merge across design, research, and artistic experimentation.

Heidi Jalkh

Nadya Suvorova

Alan Bogana (Switzerland) and Po-Hao Chi (Taiwan)

‘Microplastic fictions – Light and Sonic Entanglements’ is a collaborative research project by Swiss visual artist Alan Bogana and Taiwanese sound artist Chi Po-Hao. It investigates microplastic pollution as both material and metaphor, tracing its entanglement with human and non-human ecosystems. Through light-based sculptures, custom optics, and UV imaging, Alan explores microplastics as spectral contaminants that destabilise ideals of purity associated with light. In parallel, Po-Hao employs sound synthesis and sonification to reveal their fragmented sonic materiality, translating environmental and bodily data into immersive compositions. The resulting modular installation will interweave sculptural and auditory elements, creating a contemplative space that renders perceptible the pervasive yet elusive presence of synthetic residues in contemporary environments.

Alan Bogana

Po-Hao Chi

Elia Buletti (Switzerland/Germany) and Suvani Suri (India)

‘Penumbra’ refers to a specific shadow — one that is illuminated. In this project, the aim is to explore how this concept could serve as a conceptual and methodological framework to bring the artists’ practices together — in artistic research, storytelling, sound sculpting and performance — as an attempt to develop a hybrid form of making and transmissions, both performative and participatory.

The project is conceived in two complementary phases: the development of a sonic fiction resulting from the collaboration between the two artists, and the sharing and cross-pollination of this research through pop-up events and workshops. The artists are envisioning an experimental lecture, whose final format is multiple and variable: live art, workshop and publication. Sound-scored theory-fictional meanderings evolve through a participatory approach that will link both artists networks.

Suvani Suri was appointed as Elia Buletti’s coach when he spent three months in India in autumn 2024 for a Pro Helvetia music residency. They met in Berlin, as Suvani was invited for the Dystopia Sound Art Biennal and their first meeting was at her lecture. During the residency, Suvani and Elia naturally became curious about each other’s practices, discovering on several occasions a spontaneous affinity of intent. A shared interest in storytelling, experimental music, and ways of experiencing art and knowledge that blossomed into the idea of a co-creation. The joint project ‘Penumbra’ is the crystal sphere of this affinity, aiming to investigate the format of the lecture as a sonic fiction — in a hybrid form of both creating and sharing.

Elia Buletti

Suvani Suri

Quynh Dong (Switzerland) and Ha Dao (Vietnam)

‘Pillow Menu’ is a collaborative multimedia project exploring the politics of rest, now a luxury in multiple senses of the word. It is set against the backdrop of a five-star Swiss resort on Vietnam’s tropical coast, an architectural fiction that embodies a transnational network of leisure, desire, and soft power. The resort complex is treated as both subject and stage, repurposing the idea of the ‘self-contained destination’ to craft parallel moving image narratives. The project involves conducting research and fieldwork, co-developing a script, and finally producing a video installation that compresses the dissonant realities resulting from Vietnam’s active participation in the global economic order. The work will be presented in both Vietnam and Switzerland in 2026 and 2027.

Ha Dao and Quynh Dong first met in Hanoi in 2019 during a residency at Heritage Art Space, where both produced video works and became acquainted. They reconnected intermittently in Vietnam and later more regularly in Zurich in 2024, when Ha undertook a Pro Helvetia–supported studio residency. Through conversations about art and life over home-cooked meals, they came to recognise and deepen shared concerns. Both artists work with the camera, drawn to the poetic and conversational, and their approaches meet at the threshold of autobiography and fantasy, often referencing pop culture and mainstream media. This collaboration grows out of that ongoing dialogue and from their individual practices that are grounded in critical exploration of (self-)representation.

Ha Dao

Quynh Dong

Eva Ruof (Switzerland) and Helena Ramos (Brazil)

As the year 2025 marks the 150th anniversary of Thomas Mann, the project takes the life of his mother, Julia da Silva-Bruhns, and her often overlooked identity and memories as a starting point. Born in 1851 in Paraty (Brazil), Julia grew up in a colonial mansion cared for by her enslaved nanny before being sent to Lübeck (Germany), at age eight. By revisiting the spaces of her life, the artists address the absence of visual records of her early life. Their fictional archival retrofit aims at revealing colonial legacies, exoticised imagery, and the material traces of wealth built on enslaved labour.

The collaboration between Eva Ruof and Helena Ramos began in 2024 through an introduction highlighting our shared interests in urban counter practices and their visual documentation. At the time, Eva was preparing for a residency in São Paulo and researching the city’s nightlife, a subject Helena had long documented. This initial connection fostered exchanges, both virtual and in-person, on gentrification, cultural production, and the socio-political dimensions of the built environment in our respective contexts.

In 2025, upon Eva’s arrival in Brazil, the collaboration developed through two joint projects: a series of body scans of performance artists in São Paulo’s nightlife scene and a video projection intervention on construction sites, hovering between reality and imagination. The partnership is grounded in mutual engagement with experimental media and spatial practices, allowing us to integrate our distinct disciplinary and cultural perspectives.

Eva Ruof

Helena Ramos

Heike Fiedler (Switzerland) and Manmeet Devgun (India)

The project embodies an interdisciplinary, socio-artistic inquiry rooted in the everyday space of the kitchen, a site traditionally associated with domestic labour, gender roles, and social reproduction.

Deliberately abstracting from the functional aspects of the kitchen, the project seeks to transform this familiar environment into a space of artistic reflection, social critique, and intercultural dialogue. It explores the social, environmental, and feminist dimensions embedded within the kitchen as a symbolic, and material site. The team will collect sound and images (still, moving), write poems or short statements and use those ‘ingredients’ to prepare upcoming expositions/installations and performances, in Switzerland and in India.

Heike Fiedler

Manmeet Devgun

Frederic Siegel (Team Tumult) (Switzerland) and Rodrigo Garcia and Carlos Zerpa (MECHA) (Venezuela)

Swiss and Venezuelan artists unearth ‘The Secret Diary of Henri Pittier’ (SDHP), a new media storytelling exploration of the Swiss scientist’s complex legacy: a conservationist pioneer nurtured by a dictator in Venezuela, embittered by the lack of recognition of his motherland. The creative collaboration begins with a residency at the Rancho Grande Ecological Station in Henri Pittier National Park, Venezuela, followed by a work week at Team Tumult’s studio. SDHP interweaves authentic documents — such as Pittier’s field notes and correspondence — with original illustrations, animations, and creative writing, presented through an experimental narrative device. By blurring the line between fact and fiction, the project encourages critical engagement with the hidden stories within official legacies to spark a dialogue on corruption, biodiversity loss, and Eurocentrism.

Carlos Zerpa and Rodrigo Garcia, members of MECHA, participated in the Villa Sträuli artist residency in 2022, sponsored by Pro Helvetia South America. They met Frederic Siegel at an event organised by Swissanimation, and later visited Team Tumult’s studio, where he works. After some back-and-forth online, they decided to blend their backgrounds and skills in this new, experimental collaboration.

For MECHA, this collaboration presents an opportunity to learn from a trend-setting artist, amplifying the impact of their socially-driven narratives, and showcasing a different side of Venezuela in the arts landscape.

Frederic Siegel dedicated to crafting deeply personal, character-driven, and uniquely charming animated pieces. By collaborating with a like-minded collective, but from a different cultural perspective, this project allows him to expand his creative European framework.

Frederic Siegel (Team Tumult)

Rodrigo Garcia and Carlos Zerpa (MECHA)

Nicole Bachmann (DEARS) (Switzerland) and Kamayani Sharma (India)

Nicole Bachmann and Kamayani Sharma will co-develop a research project that will culminate in a publication through an open call, a podcast and live activations of texts. It will bring together Indian and European writers and artists. One particular axis they are interested in exploring together is the decolonisation of language, by examining the voice in traditions of Indigenous and Adivasi orature and literature. Their tactics of traversal between the oral-aural and the scriptorial challenge the colonial primacy of print and text. The project draws on the discursive potency of a historically disempowering act like listening, assigned to the voiceless.

The duo initially met during a research trip in New Delhi, after which Kamayani came to Switzerland on an arts writing residency, where Nicole was her mentor. Both are invested in exploring modes of language through acts of writing and listening in various contexts. Taking a cue from writer Sonya Huber’s assertion that voices are ‘the engines inside us that summon and refract meaning’, they share an interest in the idea of ‘voice’ in its many aesthetic, political and social meanings. While Nicole unpacks the idea of voice through performances and participatory processes, Kamayani Sharma looks at its transformations in the rhetoric of art writing, across the medium of the page that is read and the podcast that is heard.

Together they ask: what does it mean to write aloud and read audibly?

Website

Nicole Bachmann (DEARS)

Kamayani Sharma

Basile Huguenin Virchaux (Switzerland) and Samuel Karugu (Kenya)

The project focuses on reappropriating and expanding tuning heritage from East Africa, making it easily accessible for music production. This includes the development of a MPE-based VST plugin, research into ways of playing selected tunings on the saxophone, and the creation of an improved version of the instrument, made in Nairobi. The project will be carried out with an open source philosophy, and all relevant materials will be shared freely online. Samuel Karugu and Basile Huguenin Virchaux will also showcase their results and lead workshops to encourage others to use the released tools, and build their own. They will also compose an album, which will serve as both a guide for developing ideas as well as a demonstration of what can be achieved with East African tunings today.

Basile Huguenin-Virchaux and Samuel Karugu met ten years ago in an online group dedicated to Pure Data. Samuel was eager to learn more about the programme, and Basile was happy to share his insights. Later, Samuel became the producer and beatmaker of the band DUMA, and Basile was impressed by its unique blend of noise, electro grind and East African underground music. DUMA featured Basile during a show at L’Usine, Geneva (2022), which is when Samuel and Basile knew they had to collaborate. They laid the ground of their collaboration in Neuchâtel (2023), where they enjoyed exchanging ideas and playing music. They met again in Nairobi (2025) where they created an embaire-like instrument with the help of Astrid Bin and played three shows.

Basile Huguenin Virchaux

Samuel Karugu

Samira Vogel (Switzerland) and Lara Salous (Palestine)

The project ‘wool as witness’ brings together the artists’ mutual interests in textile traditions, social justice, and cross-cultural solidarity through art, research, and hands-on engagement with communities in both Switzerland and Palestine. This partnership emerges from a deep concern for the survival of shepherding and wool-based traditions in the face of economic and political pressures — be it Israeli settler violence and land dispossession in Palestine, or the marginalisation of shepherding and local wool industries in Switzerland and across Europe. The aim of this project is to connect these distant-yet related struggles by producing artistic work that uplifts the voices of shepherding communities and foregrounds the ecological and cultural significance of their practices.

The collaboration between Swiss artist Samira Vogel and Palestinian artist Lara Salous began during Samira’s Pro Helvetia residency in September 2023 in Bethlehem (Palestine), where they first connected and began planning to work together on collective weaving. Following the intensified attacks on Gaza and Palestine after 7 October, 2023, Samira’s residency in Palestine was interrupted. The residency continued at MMAG Foundation in Jordan in March 2024, where they met again and had the opportunity to weave together while exchanging perspectives on the difficulties Palestinian shepherds and weavers face in their daily practice. Since then, they have remained in contact, exchanging ideas to develop a meaningful project together that sheds light on these struggles and celebrates the resilience of traditional craft practices.

Samira Vogel

Lara Salous