Doing Loss - Concerns at Shedhalle Zürich Through the Decades – A Historiographic Speculation

This dissertation project examines the relationship between artistic and curatorial concerns and the promise of institutional transformation. It engages the notion of an institutional memory and investigates how immaterial forms of knowledge and experience are produced, preserved, and transmitted through artistic and curatorial practices. Taking Shedhalle Zurich, a self-organised, independent art space with a history spanning more than four decades, as its case study, the project explores both archival and embodied procedures as tools for rethinking institutional memory, affective labour, and the transmission of knowledge(s).

Drawing on discourses in theatre and dance studies, as well as on approaches to archiving ephemeral knowledge (Archive and Repertoire, Diana Taylor), the endeavor brings questions of canonization into the field of institutional memory. It asks which modes of working have emerged, which forms of embodied knowledge, which narratives, temporalities, and affective dynamics are traceable in the archives. It further asks how ethical and political values have been embodied and sedimented, and how they persist. In dialogue with interdisciplinary research on infrastructures, the study identifies curatorial strategies that operate structurally and reconfigure the social, economic, and epistemological conditions of artistic and knowledge production across temporal scales.

At its core, the project focuses on curatorial practices as modes of working that are always already archival and research oriented. Central to this inquiry is the question of solidarization (Bini Adamczak), approached through practices of doing loss, (Andreas Reckwitz). These practices proceed from the understanding that systemic violence affects bodies and groups unevenly, that some are more protected than others, and that such asymmetries permeate archives at an epistemic level. Doing loss designates practices of mourning and engaging with loss that arise from developmental paradigms, evolutionist narratives, and heteronormative temporal logics, within which life trajectories are enabled, foreclosed, or terminated before they emerge. Mourning encompasses an emotional of anger, defiance, guilt, fear, shame, or denial. It is also understood here as a mobilising force that co-constitutes social practices of relating and opens up possibilities for modes of solidarization.

Who can enter into solidarity with whom, and under what conditions? What constitutes a benevolent and connective mode of relationality? To address these questions, the endeavor develops the conceptual figure of the curatorial concern, Anliegen, as a guiding framework for tracing positionings in relation to responsibility and accountability within specific practices. A concern is not equivalent to curatorial intention. Rather, it articulates the entanglement of enabling conditions and fields of agency within a given historical situation. Its negotiation and articulation form a central dimension of curatorial practice.

The German term Anliegen derives from the Old High German anliogan or anliocchen and evokes processes of approaching and attaching. It points toward relationships, affect, haptics, and tactility. While a concern can be conceptually articulated, it also operates through affective intensities and manifests through temporality, attention, and relationality. Relations unfold in the in between. They belong both here and there, eluding direct visibility while remaining perceptible. As traces, they connect things, bodies, and temporalities, materialising sensorially and in embodied forms. The English term concern similarly evokes relation, proximity, and contact. A concern must therefore be understood not only in its semantic and rhetorical dimensions, but also in its operative, affective, and relational ones. In this sense, friendship, care, and ‘love’, often overlooked forms of immaterial labour, constitute and shape curatorial practices.

Through the analysis of archival materials, oral histories, and selected exhibition formats, the study investigates how art spaces operate as sites of knowledge production, how curatorial practices navigate associated power structures and forms of systemic violence, how they produce sociality, bodies, and modes of subjectivation, and how such spaces are sustained over time.