The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia presents “The Concert,” on view at the Switzerland Pavilion
during the 59th Venice Biennale. The exhibition, curated by Alexandre Babel and Francesco Stocchi,
presents scenes of impermanence, reuse, and catharsis which brings life as a cycle to the fore. Latifa
Echakhch evokes the ritual fires common to folk sculpture and customs, from the lighting of straw dolls
for the St. John’s fire to protect against demons and diseases in the summer solstice, to the burning of the Böögg on Zurich’s Sechseläutenplatz to bid farewell to the winter season. Echakhch evokes a cyclical dialogue with the building itself (designed by Bruno Giacometti in 1951), exploring the relationship of her work to the lights and sounds that emerge from its placement, and recycling most of the material used for the exhibition from previous biennales.
The result is an orchestrated and enveloping interplay of art and emptiness, allowing viewers to
experience a fuller, rhythmic and spatial perception of time and their own body. In Echakhch’s own
words, “We want visitors to leave the exhibition with the same feeling they have when they come out of a
concert. That this rhythm, those fragments of memory, still echo.”