Art in Conflict – Practice

Film Screening and Talk: Making Invisible Stories Visible – The Cinematic Work of Nicole Vögele

With the screening of Landscape and the Fury by Nicole Vögele on 20. May 2026, a cinematic format was presented for the first time within the Art in Conflict – Practiceseries. The film was made in Ravnice in northwestern Bosnia – a region where landmines from the Bosnian war remain hidden to this day, while also forming part of a European external border. Despite this dense historical and political layering, it is the routines of everyday life and a lived sense of solidarity that shape the place.

Nicole Vögele accompanied the screening and invited the audience to keep a central question in mind while watching the film: “What is a border, really?” The film was shown both on site at the Gessnerallee theater and simultaneously streamed online.

Following the screening, participants were invited to a seven-minute “automatic writing” exercise – an individual writing practice without instructions, allowing anything that emerged in the moment to flow onto the page. Each participant then shared one word with the group: landscape, drone, scar, forest, darkness, noise, rumbling, silence – and recurring throughout: the forest…

In a striking way, the experience offered a powerful reminder of what art is capable of: it can reach layers of perception that are rarely accessible otherwise. Through her film, Nicole Vögele created a sensory experience, that engaged the participants on a physical, atmospheric and subconscious level – a quality characteristic of slow cinema.

The shared experience of the film exemplified how art, activism and social engagement can relate to one another without losing their respective approaches and modes of impact. The question of what art can do did not remain theoretical but became physically perceptible for each participant. 

A sunny Sunday afternoon in March 2026 in Zurich: Thirteen participants, most of them practising artists, gathered at the Labyrinthplatz Zurich – a feminist project that has existed for over 30 years. The place describes itself as “a place of reflection, a reorientation in the present, a cultural model for forms of interaction and encounter in public space.” Here, Lera Lerner, an artist and curator with a socially engaged practice who emigrated from St. Petersburg to Paris, shared her knowledge as a doctoral plant geneticist. After a short introduction by Mara Züst, Lera Lerner guided the group through the plants native to the Labyrinthplatz. Along the way, she reflected on her artistic practice beyond institutional structures, and on the freedoms and constraints that come with it.

The participants engaged actively and attentively: they drew and took notes, laughed and exchanged ideas – both in group settings and in informal conversations. Through the sharing of knowledge and experience, connections were created across regions and generations.
 

From 28. to 30. November 2025, our new practice format Art in Conflict – Practice took place in Zurich for the first time. Nineteen participants from theatre, dance, music, and community work gathered at Maxim Theater to explore various artistic methods of socially engaged art under the guidance of artist Chimène Costa. Drawing on their own stories, the group experimented with open methods such as psychodrama, storytelling, body awareness, Playback Theatre, and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, while exchanging experiences from their work with vulnerable communities.

Through a wide range of songs and rhythms that participants taught one another, they engaged with the concept of “culture”: What do we bring into the space? What is already here? What tends to slip away? What do we connect to?

The sharing of stories, the exchange of experiences, opening up, and allowing fragility and vulnerability – all this nurtured connections and a growing sense of understanding among the people in the room. It became tangible how trust develops and provides a basis for collaboration and change, allowing them to make a difference together. Yet this requires time and presence, something we noticed repeatedly during the workshop. Art in Conflict – Practice creates a space in which a community of socially engaged artists can grow.

The workshop was documented and accompanied through drawing by artist Özlem Ünlü.