For this year’s Art Basel Messeplatz project, curated by Samuel Leuenberger, the Moroccan-born, Swiss-based artist Latifa Echakhch has erected a deconstructed stage – or rather, several stages of different sizes colliding together on the piazza.

Together, these constitute a sculptural space that both acts as a site for performances and evokes our collective memories of ruins. These stages—which can be read as scenography, obstruction, or sculpture—are meant to simultaneously fulfil and subvert the romance of live performance.

How to enable collective experience to surface without reinforcing divisions? How to conjure an “us” that does not require a “them”? How to generate an atmosphere, without removing the space necessary for critique?

Over the last few years, Echakhch has attempted to address some of these questions by engaging with musical and theatrical avant gardes adjacent to the visual arts, consistently seeking out those instances of cathartic collectivity that manifest as thoughtful rebukes to today’s emphasis on the individual.

And she has employed strategies of invitation and creative appropriation to articulate performative scenarios without “owning” them, as either author or director.

For Der Allplatz, Echakhch has teamed up with Luc Meier, the director of La Becque | Artist Residency, to program a series of live concerts and performances that interrogate the fundamentals of sound and music-making as a shared experience.

The musicians participating in the project push at harmonic and rhythmic structure and other forms of conveying narrative through sound, while also probing the limits of their instruments and of their own performing bodies.

Concert schedule

Tuesday June 13th:
12pm  Moor Mother
7.15pm Rhys Chatham solo
7.45pm  Rhys Chatham performs Guitar Trio, featuring Robert Longo and guest musicians (w/ screening of Robert Longo’s Untitled (Sea of Change, An Homage to Winslow Homer), 2022)

Wednesday June 14th:
2.30pm  Buttercup Metal Polish (Alexandre Babel and Nicolas Field) with guests
7.30pm Leila Bordreuil

Thursday June 15th:
1pm Naama Tsabar performs Untitled (Double Face) (w/ Kristin Mueller)
5pm Mats Gustafsson
7pm Naama Tsabar performs Untitled (Double Face) (w/ Kristin Mueller)
9pm Oren Ambarchi’s Carpe Diem

Friday June 16th:
2pm Lucy Railton
4.30pm Jessica Ekomane
6.30pm Chaos Clay

Saturday June 17th:
2.30pm Alvin Curran
6.30pm Not Waving

Sunday June 18th:
2.30pm Kassel Jaeger
6.30pm Okkyung Lee