HAMMERING MAN | ARCHITEKTUR DIALOGE, 2025

ARCHITEKTUR DIALOGE, 2025 – EMPTY SAPCES = THINKING SPACES

“Empty Spaces = Thinking Spaces” is the theme of this year’s Architecture Dialogues, presented as part of the Architecture Days 2025. Over the course of one week, five lunchtime tours explore office and administrative buildings in Basel that have recently been confronted with vacancy. These guided visits open up perspectives on urban development, adaptive reuse and the spatial qualities of these structures. As the guest artist of the week, I accompany the programme with site-specific interventions that respond to each location through movement, perception and embodied presence. In my performances, architecture is not treated as a backdrop but as an active partner whose materiality, structure and atmosphere invite new spaces for reflection.

HAMMERING MAN | ARCHITEKTURDIALOGE (2025)

For the performance at Aeschenplatz 6, I engage with a building in a state of transition. The former headquarters of the Swiss Bank Corporation is now a place marked by vacancy and open questions about its future. I am interested in how such a space transforms when it is not only looked at, but re-experienced through movement, repetition and mediated reflection.

The work unfolds as a triptych of live performance, video and photography. In the solo at the entrance, I explore the potential of shifting perspectives: I simulate a gravitational direction that tilts toward the walls, temporarily unsettling the familiar relationship between body and space. The audience encounters two layers simultaneously – the real physical tension and the illusion of a tilted architectural environment.

Hammering Man – Performance Aeschenplatz 6, 2025
Performance
Body-based choreographic intervention in space
Variable duration and spatial dimensions

Meanwhile, the actual staircase remains empty, even as visitors stand directly in front of it. Only later do they ascend the stairs themselves, creating a living counterimage to the concentrated digital sequence. This produces a mirrored relationship between documented and present movement.

Hammering Man – Video Butterfly Staircase, 2025
Video work
Digital video recording, loop
Variable duration

A series of photographs installed in the rear spiral staircase brings the work to a close. Many of the images are rotated, causing the gravitational orientation to shift and introducing a subtle sense of disorientation. The photographs echo my subjective experience: how space is stored in the body, how staircases structure movement, and how these transitional sites function within our embodied memory.

Hammering Man – Photographs Spiral Staircase, 2025
Photographic work
Digital print on paper
Variable dimensions

Taken as a whole, I understand this intervention as an invitation to experience architecture as a mutable landscape of perception – a field in which bodies, media and space enter into resonance with one another.