Translating practices: learnings from curators’ trips to Switzerland

Wang Naiyi:

I am a curator and researcher focused on ecological entanglement and planetary intelligence at the intersection of art, science, and technology, serving as Director of Beijing Art and Technology Biennale (BATB). My research trips in Switzerland aimed to explore Swiss artists in Arts Technologies in depth and foster transdisciplinary collaborations through curatorial practices based on the second edition of BATB titled Earthwise, which launched from October 2024 to May 2025.

Cai Liyuan:

I am the Director of A4 Residency Art Center, and Curator of A4 Art Museum. With 15 years of experience in the art industry, ranging from art museum to artist-in-residence center, I am interested in learning more about Switzerland’s efforts and practices in interdisciplinary collaboration, participatory art, commercial art, and other areas of resource cooperation in the arts, with a view to establishing further opportunities for future collaboration.

Nikita Cai Yingqian:

I am the Chief Curator of Guangdong Times Museum, where I have led the institution’s public programming and advocated for its curatorial positioning since 2017. During my stay in Switzerland, I aimed to investigate the pedagogy of conceptual practices in contemporary art, particularly in comparison to how such practices have been received and adapted in mainland China.

Ileana Ramírez Romero:

From the beginning of my residency at Atelier Mondial (Basel), my goal was to get to know the local art scene. This prompted me to propose an exhibition addressing the concept of city from the perspective of the migrant. Thus was born ‘Assumptions and Presuppositions: The Daring Attempt to Envision the Future’, with artists from different contexts — mainly Latin American. This project is closely linked to my curatorial practice, which seeks to give visibility to artists whose works engage with uprooting, memory, and community building. In my approach, I consider not only the work, but also the context of each artist. The show was conceived as a space where art becomes a means of listening to different ways of inhabiting and perceiving the city. 

Sheelasha Rajbhandari & Hit Man Gurung:

We are artists, curators, and cultural organizers and founding members of the artist collective Artree Nepal and the initiative Kala Kulo. Our journey engaged with Switzerland’s, primarily Geneva’s, vibrant network of artists, institutions, activists, academics, and cultural professionals to understand the dynamics of its artistic ecosystem. In parallel, we experienced seasonal changes and winter festivals, traced transhumance routes and cattle migrations, and observed Alpine villages adapting to rapidly shifting traditional lifestyles. Alongside these encounters, we deepened our engagement with feminist and queer perspectives and fostered cross-cultural collaborations between Nepal and Switzerland. We treated the residency as a living ground for relational exploration—building collaborations and friendships, and gathering around stories, rituals, and meals to foster meaningful conversations over superficial networking.

Wang Naiyi:

My curatorial concept of planetary intelligence (exploring non-human cognition) was powerfully reinforced through Swiss artists’ works such as AATB’s cosmic installations and Critical Media Lab’s research, validating technology’s role in revealing ecological entanglement. However, Switzerland’s robust public funding and long-term artist support challenged my assumptions about operational sustainability in non-Western contexts. While I advocate slow, care-centered curatorial practices, the scale of Swiss institutional resources (e.x, CERN’s Science Galleries, HeK’s infrastructure) contrasted sharply with the dynamic but commercially pressured environments I navigate in China, prompting critical reflection on adapting such models within different socio-economic frameworks.

Cai Liyuan:

Based on my background, I have expanded my curatorial practice into more areas and have observed many examples:

• How can art-based practices be applied to fieldwork, which involves more dimensions than just community, residents, public issues, or business?
  In this regard, I have encountered various cases, including both individual artists’ work and organizational practices. These initiatives are exploring different directions, and certain tendencies have begun to emerge.

• How can interdisciplinary collaborations and art-based practices be implemented in today’s society, and how can they be connected to broader resources?
  We are witnessing many fruitful interdisciplinary collaborations. Their success can be attributed both to the personal exploration of artists and to the support of other institutions and academic fields. Compared to collaborations within the cultural and artistic sectors, cross-disciplinary cooperation is particularly complex and challenging. However, the involvement of research institutions such as ETH and CERN is bringing increasing resources into the arts.

• How can long-term, sustainable working methods be applied to contemporary art organizations?
  This remains a pressing issue for today’s art institutions and practitioners. While the importance of diverse funding sources and both national and local support is clear, we also face significant challenges due to growing demand and shrinking budgets.

Nikita Cai Yingqian:

My perception of Conceptual Art as a Western canon was reinforced, especially given how it is systematically presented in Swiss institutions such as art academies and museums in relation to postwar global art history.

At the same time, my assumptions about how this canon has been translated and adapted in the Chinese context were challenged, prompting me to reexamine the cultural and historical frictions involved in that process.

Ileana Ramírez Romero:

My curatorial perspective underwent a process of recognition and learning. The experience turned into critical reflection, allowing me to contrast and understand the context in which my practice develops — Caracas. This contrast not only revealed the challenges of each territory, but also opened possibilities for collaboration and collective thinking. The value of independent networks and collaborative forms of organisation among artists was reaffirmed.

In terms of challenges, it was important to rethink the role of the exhibition space in relation to the viewer’s experience. Ausstellungsraum Klingental’s building and the surrounding urban context led me to question how the display could foster less hierarchical relationships between the work and the public, how to activate the space using other logics of circulation, like organising a collective meal or a karaoke party. Another challenge was to embrace my foreigner status as a catalyst for dialogue, rather than a condition of distance. From this position, I could generate meaningful encounters, act as a mediator for common concerns, and build a curatorial practice that was consonant with these sensitive experiences. 

Sheelasha Rajbhandari & Hit Man Gurung:

Our ideas slowly developed through meetings, cultural visits, and reflective exchanges with Richard Le Quellec (EOFA) and Mina Achermann and Erell Le Pape (One Gee in Fog) leading to two public editions and several smaller sharings of From Soil to Spirits: Small Rituals of Coming Together.

This experience reinforced our belief in slow, relational curating rooted in care, trust, and shared presence, deepening our awareness of the intricate connections between place, ecology, and community. Travels to Sion, the Lötschental Valley, and the surrounding Alps echoed the Himalayan landscapes we know, in the way mountain communities adapt to changing seasons, maintaining close ties to the land. These parallels reminded us that, across geographies, communities that live closest to nature hold knowledge of resilience are often first to bear the brunt of environmental and social change.

While tourism and market pressures intensify the commodification of relationships and disrupt delicate ecologies, these experiences have sensitized our approach to curating – to honor and protect such connections, and resist extractive tendencies, be they in the cultural field or in landscapes we inhabit.

Wang Naiyi:

Swiss curatorial practices profoundly informed my approach through their rigorous discursive programming (e.g., FHNW Academy’s labs) and experimental institutional partnerships (e.g., Arts at CERN), inspiring deeper artist-researcher dialogues for BATB.

However, translating these faces key challenges: 

• Funding & Institutional Frameworks: Swiss public/private patronage (e.g., La Prairie Art Fondation) is less replicable in China’s emerging art-tech ecosystem, requiring hybrid models. 
• Cultural Context: Western discourses on ‘non-human intelligence’ must be re-rooted in localized narratives (e.g., Taoist cosmologies) to resonate with East Asian audiences.
• Infrastructure Gaps: The integration of academic labs (e.g., ETH AI Center) into exhibitions demands adapting to China’s less permeable art-science boundaries.

Cai Liyuan:

Switzerland has developed distinctive approaches to interdisciplinary collaboration and localization in the arts. Long-term commitment and cross-disciplinary engagement are key drivers of sustained vitality in these efforts.

At the same time, institutions and curators face clear challenges when working on localization and transitioning projects to non-Western contexts. These challenges often stem not from isolated perspectives or individual projects, but from deeper structural and contextual differences. Key issues include:

• How to identify meaningful common ground between partners, and ensure that the topic benefits from robust local dialogue and development opportunities;
• The structural differences between Switzerland’s current art systems and resource environments and those in China, which prevent the direct transplantation or adaptation of curatorial models or practices.

Nikita Cai Yingqian:

If we understand curating as a practice rather than a formal discipline, it always unfolds within specific local conditions. In Switzerland, curatorial practices have developed within a mature contemporary art infrastructure, which makes them difficult to transplant into other contexts like mainland China, where the art ecology is still largely driven by market forces and commercial imperatives.

Ileana Ramírez Romero:

What I recognised is a vision of art with liberating potential. Among the younger generations, there is a sense of exploration toward new formats, like generative AI. Artists’ processes are closely linked to studio work, academic research, and a planned cultural system supported by regional festivals, fairs, contests, private collections, and a solid museum network. All of this is articulated with significant financial support. At the same time, I was struck by the autonomy of independent and self-managed spaces, which operate with freedom and flexibility.

These ways of curating from a collective and experimental perspective are particularly inspiring, but they also pose challenges when trying to transpose them to the Venezuelan context, where financing, infrastructure, and institutional autonomy are considerably different. Rather than replicating models, I believe the most valuable objective would be to foster exchange networks between Latin America and Switzerland, where there is a growing community of migrant artists who are beginning to forge links with their places of origin. I believe this meeting point is where a curatorial practice capable of transformation can emerge. 

Sheelasha Rajbhandari & Hit Man Gurung:

For us, curatorial practice is not something we simply adopt; it grows out of our artistic and kinship practices, shaped by both personal and collective commitments. We have learned to find grounding in local histories, relationships, and political realities, rather than seeking validation from outside institutions. This means that models developed elsewhere, especially those influenced by Western trends, do not always translate meaningfully into our context.

Wang Naiyi:

Studio visits with Swiss artists like Fragmentin and AATB—whose works directly shaped the second edition of Beijing Art and Technology Biennale (BATB)—and access to institutions (HeK, EPFL Pavilions) were invaluable for understanding embedded research practices. Equally vital were dialogues with curators (Mónica Bello, Sabine Himmelsbach, Chus Martínez, etc.) on sustainability in tech-art.

Advice for future visitors: Identify specific collaborators early. Switzerland’s density of expertise demands focused goals; I secured meetings weeks in advance via shared research interests (e.g., planetary intelligence with ETH AI Center). Prioritize niche institutions over mainstream venues to uncover contextually transferable methodologies.

Cai Liyuan:

By coming to Switzerland to see the artists at work, I have seen a vivid ecology of artists and organizations, and at the same time, I have felt the difficulties of contemporary art in gaining support and vitality in today’s social life, which is especially obvious in China today. On the other hand, I have also felt the great difference in each other’s contexts and the necessity to connect again in this rupture between cultures. It is precisely because I have experienced this in person that I feel even more strongly that we need to eliminate barriers and increase possibilities by establishing more direct cooperation.

I’d suggest that future researchers strengthen communication with their coach, which can significantly improve the efficiency and quality of their visits.

Nikita Cai Yingqian:

I found it especially meaningful to witness the broad institutional support that Swiss artists receive for interdisciplinary inquiries—not only from art schools but also from universities and research-driven institutions.

Perhaps future exchanges could also include Chinese scholars from the humanities and social sciences, who could benefit from learning how artists in Switzerland work across disciplines and engage with museum contexts in distinctive ways.

Ileana Ramírez Romero:

One of the most significant aspects for me was the strength of the artist communities that promote conviviality, critical reflection and dialogue on fundamental issues, using art as a tool to make sense of the sensibilities that run through us from history to the present.

For those who wish to undertake a residency in Switzerland as curators, my recommendation is to maintain an open and receptive attitude: approach independent spaces, take part in community activities, and understand that art there develops in constant dialogue with research, education, writing, editorial production, and also with the tensions inherent to the market and institutional structures. Be sensitive to contradictions and to the diversity of visions and positions, as the questions that arise in this field can deeply enrich any curatorial work. It is an environment that demands flexibility and critical thinking, but at the same time offers genuine opportunities for encounter and growth. 

Sheelasha Rajbhandari & Hit Man Gurung:

One of the most striking aspects of Switzerland for us was the vibrant presence of diverse diaspora communities. In meeting many cultural workers, artists, and activists, we discovered shared historical traumas, lived experiences, and similar ways of understanding the world.

Our residency also offered a precious opportunity to slow down, rest, reflect, and enjoy, especially in the warm company of Richard, Erell, Mina, and the EOFA family.

And lastly, our advice for future curators would be that Geneva is extremely expensive, which can sometimes force compromises in research and production processes. Additionally, responses to emails may be delayed, and it’s important to arrange meetings well in advance.