Interview Series «In/Visible Cultures»

Project Description
In the Transcultural Collaboration programme, students and lecturers of different arts disciplines and cultural backgrounds meet for intense four months of collective creation and learning. In particular, the programme is focussing on collecting transcultural and cross-disciplinary experiences in collaborative settings. This includes to encounter unfamiliar modes of expression and habits, but also to perceive how one’s own forms and habits appear alien to others. 

Each person brings along its cultural imprints, its own ways of thinking, speaking, gesticulating or shaping that are characteristic and typical for her/him/themself, but maybe unfamiliar, surprising  or incomprehensible for others. However, what we can’t see, we often also don’t understand. Therefore, experiences of invisibility resonate in all transcultural encounters. We may not be able to understand something at the first attempt, but maybe be able to conceive it intuitively. We have the sense that it is appearing or understood differently than it was intended. It’s difficult to label such things or your counterpart even wants to keep it secret or undetected. These are common hurdles in an encounter, but they can easily become obstacles or even lead to an escalation.

These interviews are intended to be a contribution to a creative, and in this sense also an unknown process. They are based on personal experiences of the TC participants, which they share and reflect to give a voice to the invisible, the overlooked and the unspoken.

Project Conception
Isabel Mundry, Composer, TC Lecturer, ZHdK
Dimitri de Perrot, Musician/Director, TC Lecturer
Daniel Späti, Head of TC, ZHdK

1. What is your most intense
memory of TC?

2. In what way did TC change your view on your own culture when you returned home?

3. Was there anything that you observed, but didn’t express, that you would like to tell today?

4. Did you have the feeling that you hurt somebody or did you get hurt in the programme?

5. When you are thinking of your
everyday life: What comes to your mind related to the terms “taking a look at” and “look away”?

6. What do you see in the space in which you are at the moment?

7. This question was forwarded to you by your predecessor in the interview series: …

8. What question would you like to forward to the next person in the interview series?