“Wissenschaft, Künste + Alles Andere” Symposium

The symposium Wissenschaft, Künste + Alles Andere (Science, Arts + Everything Else) took place over three days from Friday, 9 November 1990 – Sunday, 11 November 1990 at the Museum für Gestaltung in Basel, Switzerland. The event brought together over 100 women, from across German speaking countries and around the world, to discuss current affairs in the areas of art, politics, literature, activism, philosophy and more.

The symposium manifesto offered “contradiction, commonality, different working and communication methods, concentration, information, opinions, arguments and enjoyment: talking, seeing, listening, moving thorough spaces, thinking – an experiment from which new insights can develop.”

The invited participants included, among many others:
Kathy Acker, late American writer
Valie Export, Austrian artist and filmmaker
Helga Fanderl, German filmmaker
Gisele Freund, late German/French photographer
Diamanda Galas, American performer
Natalia Ginzburg, late Italian writer
Almudena Grandes Spanish writer
Guerrilla Girls, American art activist group
Zaha M. Hadid, late Iraqi architect
Friederike Mayröcker, Austrian poet
Luisa Muraro, Italian philosopher
Pauline Oliveros, late American musician
Peggy Parnass, German writer
Pipilotti Rist, Swiss artist and filmmaker
Marianne Schuller, German professor and writer
Alice Shalvi, German educationalist
Silvia Staub-Bernasconi, Swiss human rights activist
Marcia Tucker, late American curator
Zhang Xin Xin, Chinese writer

In the lead up to the 20th anniversary of the symposium, Monika Dillier and Dagmar Reichert, themselves participants in the event, began digitising over 40 hours of video filmed during the three days. With the exhibition Chambres d’Echo in November 2010, Les Complices* Gallery in Zurich, Switzerland exhibited outtakes from the footage and hosted a series of events around the themes of the archive. Journal d’Echo, a publication of new written works inspired by the symposium and produced during the exhibition, was published in March 2011 by edition fink.

WATCH: All 40 videos from the event are available at the Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv.