Protozone9 Weak – End – Opera

Protozone9 Weak – End – Opera brings together three artists for their first major institutional collaboration in Switzerland. Selma Selman, Mikołaj Sobczak, and Nicholas Grafia, friends who come from very different backgrounds, will spend a two-week residency period at Shedhalle. The three artists have in common that they treat subversion as a means of survival, and view irritation as a means to counter alienation. With references to absurdist performance and humorous play, they focus on social reality.

One might think that music has a liberating force, but the strict and hierarchical structure in opera (the set design emerging from a collaboration between Shedhalle and the Opera House in Zurich will become part of the exhibition among the art works) feels enslaving—contrary to the supposed civilisatory claims of classical music. They have collected spoken words and recycled them like scrap metal, and they refer to non-Western Music, Tropical Gothic, and Slavic folklore because these are the narratives of those whose words and melodies have never been written down.