“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.