Haus #99 [last days]
or Score for a House Facing Demolition


Format: Installation, Participative scores
Dates:
16 — 19 Jun 2016
Venue:
Neuweilerstrasse 99, Basel
Language:
English



Direction, text, design: Chris Gylee, Aslan
Project curation:
Benedikt Wyss, Demian Wohler, Deli Projekts
Project partners: Degelo Architekten
Other participating artists:
Arturo Hernández Alcázar, Gabriel Flückiger, Thomas Jeppe, Margit Säde Lehni, Carole Louis, Marina Pinsky, Sybren Renema, Juliana Irene Smith, Pedro Wirz
Photography: Carole Louis, Nicolas Gysin, Annik Steinegger


ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS will compose a cycle of scores for the public to enact. The scores will be the result of a sustained exploratory interaction with the site - Neuweilerstrasse 99 - and the people connected to it: inhabitants, other artists and visitors. The scores will be enacted, both during the residency open-house week, and after demolition, and will be available for the public to interact with freely and without charge.

There will be a workspace - a simple room - on site open to visitors that responds to our changing and developing needs. There may be just a mattress there in the beginning, but gradually, materials and tools will accumulate; two chairs, a rough desk, a typewriter, a photocopier, lamps.

There will be over the course of the residency daily investigations that engage with the site. These enquiries will be a collaborative act involving ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS, invited ‘experts’, fellow artist inhabitants and members of the public. The scores produced will be symbolic articulations of this new collective knowledge, and will address the transformation of the building and its relationship to its environment over time.
There will be a simple, repeatable format, for each score to be printed and bound into booklets. There will be as many booklets for each score as the number of people required to enact it.

There will be an evolving place for the growing collection of scores in the open workroom; a shelf at first, then a set of shelves. The housing of the scores becomes sculptural, responding to the shifting space around it. By the end of the residency, the open workroom will have been transformed into a structure that houses and protects - at least for a moment - the scores inside it. This library will be open to the public for the duration of the project.

There will be no way of knowing exactly what will happen before it happens.

There will be an invitation for everyone to meet and eat together, at least once, because there always should be.








The above images include photographs by Nicolas Gysin and ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS.

Score Cycle for a House Facing Demolition is a ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS project, as part of a residency at 99 Neuweilerstrasse within the context of Haus #99 [last days], curated by Benedikt Wyss, Demian Wohler, and Deli Projekts

Additional thanks to: Benedikt Wyss and the Haus #99 team; Juliana Irene Smith and the other particpating artists.