Foreigners Everywhere

Performing at the Cabaret Voltaire this evening (of all places), Ingo Niermann read from a text evoking the exilic legacy of Zurich—artists there to wait out wars—and the Swiss cantonal model as a baseline for socioeconomic stability amid surrounding European turmoil. Now, as ever. Seeking to playfully counter what he argued is a dearth of European "conspiracy thinking", at least relative to the US, Niermann introduced his own "Dadaist" concept for exploiting and disrupting reliable Swiss neutrality as, so he posits, the country embodies a highly migratory, anonymized future. 

For my part, I have not felt very anonymous this week, rather the opposite, reporting to the registration office, the phone company, the bank, the train line, always needing to prove my identity, verify my presence, corroborate my positioning—fiat and physical. (Such bureaucratic machinations were later taken up by Hanne Lippard in her portion of the night’s performances, in their relevance, perhaps, to her residential status in Berlin). What I have experienced thus far: someone in the crowd was talking about all the cushy, well-paid jobs that bring foreigners to Zurich, versus Basel, where the population is still more native, interactions more personal. That feels true. When you hear English on the street here, you think, Googler, or, Zuri Disney theme park moment.

In my German class, I am the sole native English speaker, everyone is learning German twice or thrice removed from their "mother tongues", a predicament I do not envy. So the connection to German in the room is predominantly through tertiary mediation. One thing we do all seem to have in common: the wish to make a life abroad, away from our home territories, irrespective of where and why or how. Such is the prerogative of the artist, attuned to the fictions of a set of given circumstances and so more inclined to seek out others. Palpable here is the nature of electing for exile (self-imposed), or in many cases, its necessity. How big the world is being what Niermann suggests as smol Switzerland's reminder, its utility as a conduit and paradigm for true "democratic" relations.

Walking by the lake at night as I made my way home, I contemplated how these topics entangle with two things: first, a recent giobiology newsletter heralding the BRICS summit and anticipating a larger global shift to Swiss-style direct-voting cantonal governance, particularly in the US, in the coming decade. From my new locational vantage, American capital certainly appears to be on the decline, or the fact that being an American, despite its fictive cache and select freedoms therein, is such a logistical pain in Schweiz underscores that likelihood. (If it were good to be American, wouldn’t it be easier?). And second, the 2024 Biennale theme, Foreigners Everywhere, with its Claire Fontaine source material, this title ringing in my head all the time now.

My first name, my Vorname, as a few people have asked me about lately, means "from the water," after: Moses, the archetype of diaspora, of in-betweens, he who leads towards land but is left without it, denied a landing so as to be kept at the penultimate crest, in the inframince, like an observing gusset, a reminder of desert-past. In its full extension, my last name, my Familienname, means “small-er,” an elaboration of the petite objet. So cumulatively, we have a "smaller exile," a shorter climb, or in my current Venus phase of watery murk, a dispatch to the riverbeds, overlooking and waiting…in watch for something firmer.