THE PROJECT AS A “MEDIUM” FOR THE ARTISTS: TURNING MEANINGLESS PROCEDURES INTO MEANINGFUL PRACTICES

This year's symposium is conceived by Benoît Antille, associate professor and researcher at the École de design et Haute école d'art du Valais (EDHEA) in Sierre.  

THE PROJECT AS A “MEDIUM” FOR THE ARTISTS: TURNING MEANINGLESS PROCEDURES INTO MEANINGFUL PRACTICES 

The project has become a primary working modality for artists, curators and researchers in the artworld. According to a 2024 study realized by the Observatoire romand de la culture (ORC), “project management occupies a significant portion of artists’ working hours in French-speaking Switzerland. […] This substantial workload is increased by the prevalence of project-based funding: 64.03% of the artists received a financial support through a specific project that requires rigorous planning.”1* A true project-economy has indeed arisen, which stands in parallel with the art market.

Most of the practitioners who operate within a project economy would agree with this: they are impelled to develop strategies to obtain funding, sometimes at the cost of their own convictions; they spend a great part of their time dealing with administrative tasks that include writing proposals, reports and budgets; their production is framed by deadlines and managerial procedures that do not fit creation or research; their artistic or academic work is subsumed to criteria and injunctions imposed from outside: they have to innovate, produce tangible outcomes, solve concrete problems; etc. This is why the project economy is usually seen as a means to instrumentalize the work of artists. Researcher, curator and lecturer Kuba Szreder has even argued that a new form of proletariat has arisen that he calls a “projectariat.”2*

While the argument of instrumentalization is legitimate, it is partially true, because the project economy leaves room for different forms of agencies. Moreover, to best operate at the heart of the social fabric, engaged artists have long appropriated the project, its procedures and methodologies, such as mapping the terrain, collaborating beyond disciplinary and sectoral boundaries, managing teams, solving problems, etc. As the documentary Contemporary Art at the Test of the Rural: Working Modalities of Project Artists sought to demonstrate, in other words, some artists have already made of the project a sort of medium in its own right, so turning meaningless procedures into meaningful practices.3 This precisely is the idea that the 2026 Master Symposium seeks to explore in Sierre, through workshops that address four categories of projects which are emblematic of the project economy: Kunst-am-Bau projects, artists-in-residence projects, research projects and social projects.

Students will have to choose one workshop, but a same approach will be implemented in all of them. These workshops will explore ways to turn the project into a medium through addressing the specific conditions of these four situations (Kunst-am-Bau projects, artists-in-residence projects, research projects and social projects): In which context are these projects implemented? How are these they structured? What is expected from artists? What type of skills do they require? How to manage such projects? What types of agencies do these projects call for? Etc. Ultimately, students and the guests in charge of the workshop will ask themselves how to position oneself in the project economy, and take the best of it?

To keep a trace of these reflexions and share them with all the participants, each group will have half an hour to prepare a synthesis that will be presented before the end of the symposium.

1* Catherine Kohler, « Parcours des artistes en Suisse romande : Ressources et étapes clés », Observatoire romand de la culture (2024): https://www.observatoire-culture.ch/etudes/les-parcours-des-artistes-en-suisse-romande/
2* Kuba Szreder, The ABS of the Projectariat: Living and Working in a Precarious World (Manchester University Press, 2021): 10-11.
3*Contemporary Art at the Test of the Rural: Working Modalities of Project Artists. A documentary realized by Benoît Antille and Stéphane Darioly (2018-2019, 2023-2015), 1’35’’ © EDHEA’s Research Institute of Visual Arts (IRAV): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwIjp9Vn0Xw

PROGRAM 

09h45 – 10h15 Welcome and distribution in the workshops in the Grande Salle de l’Hôtel de Ville de Sierre (Rue du Bourg 14)

10h15 – 10h30 The groups walk to the different locations

10h30 – 12h30 Workshops, first part

12h30 – 13h30 Workshops, lunch on site (the groups will stay together, vegetarian lasagna will be served by the school)

13h30 – 15h30 Workshops, second part

15h30 – 16h00 Workshops, synthesis and back to the meeting point

16h15 – 17h30 Presentation of the synthesis (10 minutes max. for each group) and farewell

1) Kunst-am-Bau projects, with Robert Ireland (CH) & Renate Buser (CH): This workshop focuses on percent for art projects, which refer to programs where some percentage of an architectural project realized with public funding allows to produce a site-specific artwork.

Renate Buser is a Swiss artist and professor in the Fine Arts program (MA CAP + BA) at Bern University of the Arts. She studied at the Basel School of Design and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice (Emilio Vedova’s class). She participated in several residency programs, as at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada or in Berlin. Since 2005, she did various research trips, notably to Tokyo, London, Montreal, New York, and Ivrea, focusing on Brutalist and Modernist architecture. In 2019, she received the Research Grant «Stepwells in Rajasthan and Gujarat» from Landis & Gyr Cultural Foundation. The artist realizes site-specific, photographic installations in public spaces as well as exhibitions in institutions. Her artistic practice also includes a various number of permanent Kunst-am-Bau projects. The artist was represented by the gallery Gisèle Linder Basel from 2005 - 2025.

Robert Ireland is artist and associate professor at EDHEA (Master, Bachelor, IRAV). He holds a Master of Fine Arts (HGK-FHNW, Basel) and has led the class Natural, Architectural, and Built Environment (ENAC) at EPFL. His artistic practice includes numerous interventions in public spaces, theoretical/critical texts, and exhibitions. He took part in several research projects of EDHEA, such as “Pavilions, Art in Architecture” (2012-2013), “Homezone” (2013-2017), “Artwork(ers)” (2016-2017), “Staging architecture” (HES-SO, 2023-2025; publication) and on “Faire école” (HES-SO, 2025-2026). He has led several research projects including “Situations sensibles: pour une esthétique de l’ambiance” (HES-SO, 2018-2020) and “Imaginaires résiduels: Réflexions sur les conditions contemporaines de l’esthétique ” (HES-SO, 2020-2021).

2) Artists-in-residence projects, with Heidi Vogels (NL) & Séverin Guelpa (CH): This workshop focuses on artists-in-residency programs, which allow artist to spend some months in a specific place around the world to undertake some research and/or realize a project.

Heidi Vogels is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam, where she studied Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. She is Advisor for DutchCulture | TransArtists that shares knowledge and experience on artist-in-residence programmes and other international opportunities. Her practice unfolds through long-term research into the garden (as a layered and heterotopic space – a place that connects nature and culture, the domestic and the public and the tangible and the imagined), the outcomes of which take the form of film, and extend to installations and participatory programs that activate and share these findings. As co-initiator of Bureau Postjesweg, an art space in Amsterdam Nieuw-West, she developed Garden Collectives, a program engaging communities with garden spaces, and she served as art program director for documentary art festival Cracking the Frame Presents. Vogels’ work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Le18 in Marrakech (MA), Jut Art Museum in Taipei (TW), TENT in Rotterdam (NL), and Do-a-Front in Yamaguchi (JP).

Séverin Guelpa is a Swiss visual artist whose practice lies at the intersection of art, ecology, and territorial research. Through installations, films, performances, and collective projects, he has spent more than a decade exploring fragile or transforming environments—Alpine glaciers, deserts, and quarries—in order to question our relationship to landscape, resources, and natural dynamics. He is also the founder of the MATZA project, a collaborative platform that brings together artists, scientists, and local inhabitants around expeditions and site-specific artistic actions. Often created in extreme contexts or far from traditional exhibition spaces, his work has been presented in numerous institutions and biennials (Palais de Tokyo/Paris, Museu do Amanhã/Rio de Janeiro, etc.), while developing forms of collaboration that turn territory into a space for experience, reflection, and collective resonance.

3) Research projects, with Jeroen Boomgaard (NL) & Ilse van Rijn (NL): This workshop focuses artistic research realized in an academic context, such as art schools or universities.

Ilse van Rijn is a writer, researcher and Dozentin of the Institute for the Performing Arts and Film at ZHdK in Zurich. Educated in both literature and art history, she is interested in the relations between image and language; word and world; body, writing and their surrounds. She holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam (UvA), developed in collaboration with the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (GRA) and the Jan van Eyck Academy (JvE), in which she questions the operative force of writing, unfolding a poetics of the artist’s text (The Artist’s Text as Work of Art, 2017). Her current research furthers her investigations in embodied forms of writing, reading them through the lens of feminist legacies, and their potential in today’s other-than-human world. Before moving to Zurich, studies have led Ilse from Amsterdam (UvA) to Paris (Paris I/Sorbonne), Maastricht (JvE), and back to France (Ecole Normale Supérieure). In Amsterdam, she has developed the theory program of the department of Image & Language (GRA), initiated the temporary master program Approaching Language (Sandberg Institute, 2019) and the inter-curricular program Daily Writing (GRA, 2022).

Jeroen Boomgaard studied Art History at the University of Amsterdam. He received his PhD in Art History from that same university. From 2003 to 2021 he was Professor of Art and Public Space at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Until 2019 Boomgaard held a position as assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, functioning as coordinator of the Research Master track Artistic Research since 2007. In that capacity he has been co-supervising 6 PhD’s. At the moment he is still co-supervising 4 PhD candidates in artistic research. He has been one of the initiators of the “Creator Doctus pilot,” a three-year pilot project conceived at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam and co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union (2018-2021), which ambition was to seed the development of a 3rd Cycle research degree within the Bologna Process that would be equivalent to a traditional Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) but based in a field generally known as ‘artistic research.’

4) Social projects, with Kuba Szreder (PL) & Véronique Ferrero-Delacoste (CH): This workshop focuses artists-led initiatives that seek to intervene directly in the social fabric so address social, political or environmental issues and to collaborate with communities and constituencies.

Kuba Szreder is a researcher, curator, and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He collaborates with artistic unions, consortia of postartistic practitioners, clusters of art researchers, art collectives, and artistic institutions across Europe. His current research interests include the conditions of artistic labour, new models of artistic institutions, artistic self-organization, artistic research, and postartistic theory and practice. A specialist of the project and its economy, Szreder published The ABC of the Projectariat: Living and Working in a Precarious Art World was published in 2021 (Manchester University Press and the Whitworth). In 2025, together with Kacper Greń and the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, he published the visual essay “Duckrabbits Unveiled: A Sneak Peek at Postartistic Theory and Practice.” For more information on Szreder’s work, you can check this podcast made by the ZKM in Karlsruhe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLkCgTyRnoc

Véronique Ferrero Delacoste is a curator specialized in the performing arts. She holds a Master’s degree in Art in the Public Sphere (MAPS) from EDHEA. From 2010 to 2022, she directed far° fabrique des arts vivants, a nationally and internationally renowned organization where she developed an innovative and socially engaged artistic project. Her expertise in implementing co-creative cultural programs that promote inclusion and integration led her to teach at the Haute école de travail social et de la santé Lausanne (HETSL) in the CAS and DAS programs in mediation, participation, and cultural projects (2014 to 2022). Alongside her curatorial work, she serves on various commissions and is regularly invited as an expert and jury member. Her research focuses on transdisciplinary practices and the role of art in society as a means of knowledge and sensory experience. Her current role as director of least [laboratoire écologie et art pour une société en transition] focuses on issues of art and ecology in a society in transition.