By Keng Chen (Performance, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou), Dino Radoncic (Design, Zurich University of the Arts), Jiang Hui (Choreography, independent, Shanghai), Nathalie Stirnimann (Fine Arts, Zurich University of the Arts), Stefan Stojanovic (Fine Arts, Zurich University of the Arts), Liu Wen-Chi (Transdisciplinary Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts)

Intro

Concept and Process

When do you think it’s too late to learn how to swim?

We obviously didn’t manage to teach our lovely group member Keng how to swim after two full days in the swimming pools of Berlin, but it showed us much more:

Using swimming as a connection task, we figured out, that it’s more than coordinated floating on water. Its about finding the balance between personal and public spaces, trust and courage, transmission and heritage, culture and language, gestures and empathy.

We were excited to bring back to Zurich a topic which contained potential for further and deeper work.

To give importance to the mentioned explorations, we decided to finish our process among our peers, in form of a self-reflected feedback round. In this feedback round we reflected (about) our work and the time spent together.

The focus was on the working methods and on the beauty of misunderstandings rather than on what we discovered – content wise – yet.

With this done, we tested out the boundaries of the presentation format.

To respect our discoveries, the subject itself and the material produced, we decided to show, as part of the documentation, a compressed and minimized glimpse of the way our group made it to Berlin and even further.

This is us, swimming in craziness and water.

Results/State of play