Sunday 8th May 2016, 2:30pm
Getaway #17: Yasmin Kiss & Nino Gadient
Yasmin Kiss and Nino Gadient chose the getaway destination for the seventeenth Outside Sunday together.*)
– Two things made them team up while studying at ZHdK: a shared intellectual curiosity and his enthusiasm for possibly everything. Their first collaborative project was concerned with Robert Filliou and chance.
In 1963 Filliou fixed January 17 as Art’s Birthday. We fixed the 8th of May as the getaway date. The 8th of May is the day the Second World War ends. The 8th of May is the day Coca-Cola is introduced to the world. On the 8th of May the pocks are declared extinct as a disease. It’s the day the last Beatles album is released. It’s the day Mount Everest is climbed for the first time without additional oxygen supplies.
Having fixed the 8th of May as the date – me calling Yasmin from Berlin –, Nino approves of it sending an email from Japan. In 1966 Filliou sends three telegrams to „you wherever you are“; one of them states: “Tout arrive et tout arrive en même temps” –
*) Mirjam Bayerdörfer invited Yasmin Kiss, Yasmin Kiss invited Nino Gadient for the fifteenth Outside Sunday.
[Report]
Tail and De-Tail
90 % of what you perceive of a city is so unspectacular, it could be any city: Realizing this (while standing on a hill’s slope seamed with woods close to the city boundary) made Zurich almost disappear. Which again was a rather spectacular effect.
So this is how it’s done:
Have everyone draw from a collection of coloured cardboard samples. Thus each visitor is assigned with a colour. The task is to find matchingly coloured things while crossing the city roughly diametrically.
There was a lot of bending and reaching and kneeling, focussing at arms length on leaves and flowers, ice cream wrapping papers, advertising boards, standardized CI colour patterns of public transportation, dirt, street signs, shoelaces, fences, doorknobs.
The group moving somehow forward formed a blob that waved its a tail, stretching over quite an area and distance. It proved impossible to stick together or to move congruently and continuously once each groupmember focusses on an individual task, stopping at random intervals for random amounts of time, being paralyzed by colours and the act of visual perceiving: The exercise of making Zurich disappear by looking at selected details.
Having started at Friedhof Sihlfeld we eventually ended up on a lookout in Albisrieden. Looking from far over all the living areas at great distance you can eventually make out the tiny silhouettes of towers, seemingly familiar, like something you’d remember from a dream. Never had Zurich looked like this before. It felt like looking at the city from underneath – at its tail.
Only now their relatedness became obvious and meaningful: Tail and De-Tail.