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.
MESSETURM | ARCHITEKTUR DIALOGE (2025)
The intervention in the Messeturm continues my investigation into how body, image and architecture shape one another. While the staircase in the former post building served as a choreographic counterpart – a site where movement and spatial structure intertwined – the focus here shifts to the photographic trace itself. The performative explorations of the empty office floor were first captured photographically: moments in which my body tests the forces, edges and surfaces of the space. These images return to the site as scaled-down prints, creating a precise friction between the real location and its representation. The simultaneity of original and miniature produces a physically perceptible “zoom,” an oscillation between scale, perspective and orientation.
Body-architecture merges
A second strand of the work addresses the speculative expansion of this approach through artificial image intelligence. I photographed architectural details – small elements that often go unnoticed within our visual routines – and merged them, using image-generating AI, with photographic freezes from my dance vocabulary. By deliberately avoiding text prompts, the results remain closer to the aesthetic qualities of the source material. The AI fuses both layers based on formal image parameters and generates hybrid body-architecture figures that appear both familiar and strange. This produces a complex visual world that disrupts habitual seeing and opens a space for amusement, wonder or unease. In this way, a threefold gaze emerges: toward the real space, its photographic trace and its algorithmic transformation. The Messeturm becomes – much like the staircase in the post building – a choreographic
AI generated Remixes
