Check out our new PEERS cohort


We are excited to announce that we are going to kick off with our new PEERS this March.
Needless to say, we want congratulate our four new PEERS on successfully absolving our application process and we are excited to announce them to you:

Erato Tzavara with «Performing the Digital – Expanding the Body. A feminist view of digital visual cultures through the lens of performance art and somatics»
Till Wittwer with «Facts, Fictions, Narratives Financial Markets and Their Efficacious Fictions»
İrem Aydın with «The Deconstruction of Sci-Fi Theater: An Exploration of Future Possibilities in Queer and Migrant Narratives»
Leopold Helbich Frey with «A Sensory Ethnography of Transhuman Perception Cinema, Cyborgs and Cybersemiotics in the Age of AI»

If you want to find out more about the peers, feel free to check out their short bios on our PEERS-page.

PEERS Soma Mamadou and his performance “Silmandé” (whirlwind) at FITMO Festival Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, 2023

In his research, Soma Mamadou explores the idea of decolonizing theatrical practice in Burkina Faso and how a liminal space can be transformed through the adaptation of Senufo traditional rituals of passage into a participative performance.

Regarding the piece:

We’re on a mining site, and a man is stopped in front of the offices. It’s clear from his attire that he’s a mine employee. You can also see that he’s angry.
He has just lost yet another loved one, a colleague on the site, a brother, and a son, due to the poor safety conditions in which the employees work… The toxic waste dumped here and there on the outskirts of the site is also putting the inhabitants of the surrounding villages at risk. The irresponsibility of the government disgusts the workers…
For SILMANDE, it’s the last straw.
He decides to throw away his helmet and express his frustration! Only his long-suppressed anger can’t be expressed in words. Words fade away to give way to cries from the heart, and when the mouth can no longer speak, the body takes over.

The set design is soft: just a few symbolic objects. Only the actor’s body needs to fill the space. Lighting is stripped of all overloads. The actor’s sweaty body.

The costume is made up of work clothes and, as an undergarment, twenty or so T-shirts bearing the names of major companies and organizations responsible for human exploitation and the degradation of our subsoil and atmosphere. These include Nestlé, Kalashnikov, Bolloré, G5, G20, Apple, SATOM, IAMGOLD, Total Energy, etc.

It’s a show punctuated by movement (dance and acrobatic movement), ritual, images, and sound. Silmandé is an expression of freedom, self-conquest, dignity and pride, and a commitment to environmental protection.

Check out our new PEERS cohort

We are excited to announce that we are going to kick off with our new PEERS this March. Once again, we will hold this event at the beautiful Cima Citta venue in the Ticino to start off with our new participants.
Needless to say, we want congratulate our five new PEERS on successfully absolving our application process and we are excited to announce them to you:

Li Chen (u.l.) with “Visualising Historical Memories with Photo-filmic Images”
Piibe Kolka (u.m) with “A (Drag) King Listens. Artistic Research Project in Expanded Cinema”
Lea Letzel (u.r.) with “Theme And Variations. Pyrotechnik und Klang”
Soma Mamadou (l.l.) with “The Decolonisation of Theatre in Burkina Faso”
Verena Steiner (l.r.) with ““Monströse” choreographische Anordnungen als subversive Praktik”

If you want to find out more about the peers, feel free to check out their short bios on our PEERS-page.

PEER Sam Crane’s production won Stage Award’s Innovation Award

Photography © Copyright The Stage Media Company Limited 2021 – Jen Cohn, Mark Osterveen, Sam Crane, Ola Dipo, Pinny Grylls

We are excited to announce that our PEER Sam Crane’s production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in GTA got nominated and won the Stage Award‘s “Innovation Award”. The Stage Awards are the highest profile awards celebrating excellence in British theatre across the whole of the UK. The awards recognise excellence in British theatre and will celebrate achievements in the theatre industry from December 2021 – November 2022.

The Third Cycle is very excited for him and we want to congratulate Sams on his success!

Catch Bernadette Kolonko’s Film “IN_VISIBLE” at the International Short Film Days in Winterthur

11. – 13. November 2022

Fellowship alumni, filmmaker and current research associate Bernadette Kolonko has been invited to show her short film “IN_VISIBLE” (“UN_SICHTBAR”) at the Short Film Days in Winterthur. It is part of the segment “Zürich Shorts” and you have the possibility to watch it all weekend long.

For further information on the segment or to buy tickets, check out the festivals programme.

The film is a cinematic letter, exploring family archive, the past and the present: Beginning with the image of her mother avoiding the male gaze, the filmmaker opens a discourse on her own socialisation through images – testing the ability of her own body to become that of a flaneuse and approaching a feminist gaze.

For further Information on the short film festival, feel free to visit the Kurzfilmtage-Website.

Autumn Academy: “Verschwörung, Fake und Gewissheiten”

24.- 26. October 2022

Last week the ZHdK hosted this years autumn academy “Conspiracies, Fakes and Certainties”. Interdisciplinary workshops by doctoral students from the PhD program “Epistemologies of Aesthetic Practices” and lecturers took place from Monday, October 24th to Wednesday, October 26th, 2022.

The workshops and talks thematics varied from (in)tolerance of ambiguity, making art in times of crisis and much more.

If you are interested in the conferences programme, feel free to check it out here.

PhD Symposium Constellations

07. – 09. November 2022 | ZHdK Toni-Areal, Zürich

We invite everyone to join in the PhD symposium “Konstellationen — Constellations” this November.
The symposium is dedicated to topics related to the Third Cycle and artistic research. The focus is on the presentation and discussion of current doctoral projects at ZHdKʼs Department of Music and the Department of Performing Arts and Film. Approaches to artistic-scholarly research in relation to institutional structures and supervision will be discussed in panels with internal participants as well as with guests from our partner universities (University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, Stockholm University of the Arts and University of Gothenburg).

For more information on the symposium and the exact programme, feel free to check out the official flyer.

Bernadette Kolonko’s Film “IN_VISIBLE” at CineFest in Miskolc

09. – 17. September 2022 – Miskolc, Hungary

Fellowship alumni, filmmaker and current research associate Bernadette Kolonko has been invited to show her shortfilm “IN_VISIBLE” (“UN_SICHTBAR”) at the Hungarian film festival CineFest in Miskolc.

The film is a cinematic letter, exploring family archive, the past and the present: Beginning with the image of her mother avoiding the male gaze, the filmmaker opens a discourse on her own socialisation through images – testing the ability of her own body to become that of a flaneuse and approaching a feminist gaze.

For further Information on the festival, feel free to visit the CineFest-website.

PEERS Call For Applications 2023/24

The PEERS Call for Application for the 2023/23 cohort is live now.

We are looking up to five mid-career artists with profound artistic practice in theatre, dance, performance or film. Candidates must hold an MA or an equivalent degree. They will be expected to develop research and peer learning methodologies, as well as have a viable research plan.

Please apply for the new cohort via the official Application-link. Application deadline is the 30. September 2022 at 17:00 (CEST).

For more information on the Call for Application, check out the official Call PDF.

For more information on the PEERS programme, please check out the PEERS subsite.

PEER Anouk Hoogendorn at London Conference in Critical Thought

08. – 09. July 2022 – Birkbeck College, University of London

Anouk will be part of the London Conference in Critical Though within the panel ‘The Undercommons: Wilderness and Alternative Strategies ‘ as part of the Art Practice and Critical Pedagogy stream.
The title of their input is ‘Relaying Lures: Language in Artistic Research,’ where they propose to give a performance lecture that puts forward an exploration of words and ways that do not register in typical parameters of language and experience. This performance lecture aims to explore the difference between the lure of gifting a name and the possible reduction or violence by this very capture. How to think with both the necessity of articulating in the sense of relaying or setting out a lure for thought-thinking while not letting those fall back into a reduction of experience? How to craft conditions for the qualities of variation in the world to be felt, tending and tuning to those differences that do not register in typical parameters of what counts, of what is counted?

For more information on the conference, check out their website.

PEER Sam Crane at Athens Digital Arts Festival 2022

25. – 29. May 2022 – Athens, Greece

Sam has participated in the Athens Digital Arts Festival 2022. He gave a talk about his work and also received an award for his film “We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On”, which won 1st prize in the Video Art category. Further he held a performance lecture, in which he articulated the methods for performing Shakespeare inside video games, that took place for an in-game audience inside GTA Online, and simultaneously for a real life audience in the lecture hall in Athens.

For further information on the Festival, please visit their website.

The Future Of The Earth Performance by Patrick Gusset

15. – 18. June 2022 – 19:30 – Zentrale Pratteln | Live Stream via ROXY Birsfelden, Gessnerallee, Theater Chur, KlimaKontor and the Natural History Museum Basel

Patrick Gusset’s performance series ” The Future Of The Earth” takes scientific facts and makes them a sensual experience. Using the artistic method of pre-enactment, the consequences of global warming will be played out over four evenings by a transdisciplinary team of artists and scientists as part of a performance series. Each evening a different part of either a best case or worst case climate scenario will be presented and discussed.

Find out more about the pre-enactment series on their website.

New PEERS Cohort meets at Cima Citta

On March 3rd to 5th, the first meeting of the six PEERS of the second cohort took place in beautiful Ticino in an old chocolate factory called Cima Citta. Due to the current situation, unfortunately not all of our cohort were able to travel to Ticino therefore we worked in a hybrid format. Four of our PEERS were able to attend on site and two of them attended via Zoom. The intent of the first meeting was about sharing, aiming to present the individual research projects to the group for the first time, to receive feedback from the group, to cook, to walk and to get to know each other.

PEERS alumni Hendirk Quast’s WDR radio play “Nagelneu” awarded “Radio Play of the Year 2021”

The WDR radio play “Nagelneu” with Peers alumni Hendrik Quast was awarded “Radio Play of the Year 2021” by the Deutschen Akademie der Darstellenden Künste (German Academy of Performing Arts). “It is very special that this unusual acoustic production, its text genesis and way of speaking have prevailed! But it is also nice to notice that the persistence in wanting to make other (humor) forms, arts and voices (of a different class) audible has paid off!”, comments Hendrik upon receiving the award.

You can find the radio play in the ARD media library.

The 3rd Cycle congratulates Hendik and the rest of the team for the award and their amazing work.