Artist and performer Timo Paris presents a site-specific performance on the Novartis Campus Basel, exploring the relationship between body, architecture, and perception. Developed as part of Architektur Dialoge Basel 2025, the work responds directly to iconic artworks and architectural structures on the campus, including pieces by Olafur Eliasson, Richard Serra, Eduardo Chillida, and Ulrich Rückriem.
Through slowed-down movement, precise bodily positions, and photographic interventions, Paris blurs the boundaries between performance, sculpture, and spatial experience. His investigation into gravity, temporality, and orientation transforms the campus into a resonant field in which body and architecture mutually activate one another.
The performance forms a subjective cartography of perception — a performative mapping that renders the campus newly legible within the broader discourse of performance art, architecture, and contemporary choreography.
INTRODUCTION
Timo Paris’ performance on the Novartis Campus is part of an ongoing investigation into the interplay between body, space, and perception, rooted in his video works La Tête Dans Les Étoiles and SCRUPUS. The piece unfolds along a choreographed path through the campus, situated within the dynamic field between body, architecture, and art.
The performance activates the campus as an experimental resonance space in which artworks, architectural structures, and the human body become equal agents. In the precise interlacing of movement and site, a subjective cartography of perception emerges — a performative atlas that renders the iconic works of the campus newly legible and temporarily suspends the boundaries between sculpture, body, and image.
Paris searches for moments in which perception shifts — when architecture ceases to be merely space and becomes body, and when movement transforms from gesture into perception itself.
ENTERING THROUGH IMAGES
The performance began with a selection of photographs. These images show Paris interacting with various locations on the campus — between sculpture, architecture, and landscape. Through carefully composed gestures, he examines gravity, orientation, and perspective. Camera rotations and unusual bodily positions create the impression that gravity has changed direction; the body appears to dissolve into the architecture or push against it.
This photographic series is not a documentary supplement but an autonomous study of perception. It transforms the campus into a stage of subjective experience, where real structures tilt into surreal image-spaces. Boundaries between movement, stillness, and image become porous. The overlap of body and architecture, photographic surface and physical environment forms a visual language that renders the campus as a resonant field of lived perception.
Presented within the glass architecture of Eva Schlegel’s Walkway, the photographs intensified this sense of permeability. Movement, light, reflection, and transparency merged into a layered perceptual field that made the relationship between body and space not only visible but somatically palpable.
BETWEEN BODY AND MASS
On the Forum, beside Ulrich Rückriem’s monumental 7 Steine, Paris intertwined his body with the granite volumes. In slowed-down movements he leaned, hung, and supported himself on the stone blocks, becoming for brief moments a living sculpture. These gestures created temporary images in the surrounding space and opened associative fields. The reduction of movement speed induced a media shift — a physical stretching of time that slowed vision itself, recalibrating the perception of weight, balance, and gravity.
“I’m interested in how architecture can become a resonance space for the body — how physical presence and materiality activate one another. In the encounter with Rückriem’s stones or Chillida’s interlocking steel forms, I sense the thresholds between movement and mass, between breath and structure. These friction zones are, for me, the true site of dance.”
As the tour progressed, Paris continued his interventions at other iconic artworks on the campus: in Eduardo Chillida’s Estela de Gernika III, where verticality and rotation merge, and within the plates of Richard Serra’s Dirk’s Pod, where the relationship between body and weight becomes physically immediate.
CIRCLES OF PERCEPTION
The performance culminated in a longer sequence at Olafur Eliasson’s Oscillation Bench. Paris moved first in slow circles along the bench’s concentric lines, gradually accelerating until gravity itself became choreographic — pressing the body into the slanted form so that function, sculpture, material, and movement fused. This sequence condensed the central theme of the work: the manipulation of gravity as a metaphor for the shifting of perception.
The bench’s design is based on the moment a water drop hits a surface — a poetic gesture with both physical and metaphorical force. In Paris’ reading, this moment becomes an imaginative zoom: the drop enlarges to something monumental, time stretches, and the slow motion acts as a temporal zoom — akin to expanding a digital timeline in which the hidden intervals suddenly become visible. Movement becomes a lens through which perception slows, intensifies, and expands.
From this perspective, architecture itself becomes a body responding to gravity, rhythm, and motion. The dialogue between body and structure unfolds as an interplay of positive and negative form — the human figure as plastic counterpart to architecture, and architecture as the imprint of bodily movement.
The bench, conceived as a place for rest, transforms into a kinetic structure. The rotation of the body expands the static architecture into a temporal dimension in which perception, weight, and space flow into one another.