Anastasia Chaguidouline: What exactly was the situation of Cabaret Voltaire before you started working there? What year did you start working there?
Adrian Notz: I started in 2004. That was the year of the re-opening in September 2004. Before that, the whole building was squatted in 2002 by artists for a couple of months. Mark Divo, Pastor Leumund, and Ayana Calugar were the head figures of a lot of local and international artists who lived there and made daily programs, exhibitions, and crazy actions during that time, which earned a lot of international attention. It is thanks to the squatters that people in Zurich, in Switzerland, and worldwide, became aware that Zurich has this cultural heritage, the birthplace of Dada.
After the squatting, a committee was founded and a project group formed. An architectural competition to renovate the place was put into place, which Rossetti + Wyss won. The members of the initial project group were Juri Steiner, a locally known Dada specialist, Thomas Kramer, a journalist and now head of publishing house Scheidegger & Spiess, and Karin Hilzinger, a design thinker, as she calls herself today. The overarching context out of which the project group, the architects, and also other supporters emerged was the Expo.02, a big national spectacle that was happening in the French part of Switzerland (May 15, 2002 to October 20, 2002). I started more or less in June 2004, as an assistant of Philipp Meier, who had been appointed as the director (of Cabaret Voltaire).
Also, Swatch was a sponsor at that time, where Swatch basically said that they would pay for the program, if the city paid the rent of the space. So, we had Hayek Jr. at the opening, and John Armleder made an art piece made out of Swatches (Swatch watches). The Mayor of Zurich, Elmar Ledergerber, was, of course, also present at the opening.
AC: After the building was squatted, did the City of Zurich become aware of the importance of this building and its history?
AN: In a way, yes. There were a lot of political debates in the local parliament, because when Swatch said they would pay for the program for four years, they simultaneously suggested that the city should pay for the rent of the building. The building belonged to an insurance company, Swiss Life. To be able to pay that rent, the City needed to have a parliamentary decision. There was a big very Dada-inspired debate in the parliament in 2003. The right-wing parties were, of course, totally against Cabaret Voltaire stating: “Dadaism, Anarchism, Terrorism!”
On the other hand, there were socialists, some of them teachers of German, fans of Dada and even the Christian party, the CVP. There was one moment when Marc Richli, one of the socialists, recited Karawane (a sound poem by Hugo Ball) in the parliament. That encouraged a lot of room for debate, fights, it was a legendary parliament meeting in Zurich.
It is a nice story that a squatted place becomes a public cultural place. What was not so nice is that the government didn’t really talk to the squatters. They let the artists do what they wanted to do during the squatting, and the cultural director of the city helped them a lot during that time, negotiating with the police, but they were never seriously considered to run the space.
AC: So, that is why a committee was brought into place, to not let it become an artist-run space?
AN: Yes, that would have been too wild for the City of Zurich. Besides, founding a committee or an association is a very Swiss thing to do.
AC: So, it was put in a framework that would work for the city as well.
AN: There was a committee with about 2,000 members that was put into place, with people from culture, from advertising, politicians. They signed a full-page ad in the NZZ (Neue Zürcher Zeitung) under the name “Pro-Dada Haus.” They tried to generate broader support, rather than just appealing to the squatting scene. However, the squatters did get the feeling that Cabaret Voltaire was being taken away from them. But they kept on doing this “Dada Festwochen,” a festival that ran every year in different squatted spaces in Zurich and abroad.
AC: Is this initiative going on today?
AN: Not in Zurich. Mark Divo lives close to Prague. Pastor Leumund is in Berlin. Ayana Calugar is still here in Zurich, and she organizes open-stage events.
A.C.: And how did you proceed to become a director?
AN: I was just very good! (laughs) At the beginning, Phillip, who was my boss at the time, and I did some projects which were a bit too provocative for the city of Zurich. There was one workshop we did together with the media group bitnik where we invited street artists from London, C6. They went all around the city and did a stencil with Mona Lisa, and they had QR codes so one could know exactly where the pieces were located. It was very easy for the police to figure out where the pieces were and how many were done. So, one actually got the idea that people who had joined in the workshop, then went out in the city to do these stencils, which made some local politicians and the building owners’ society furious. The FDP said: “This is vandalism!”
We once also had a shop, and some designers or artists from Basel did two T-shirts with an AK-47 on it and with Brigitte Mohnhaupt, who was one of the RAF terrorists that had just been released from prison. We also had the Che Guevara poster next to it. In a way, we wanted to say that maybe the RAF might become a fashion like Che Guevara.
AC: Nowadays, there are so many T-shirts with R.A.F.
AN: T-shirts, Gerhard Richter’s works, films, etc. At the time that didn’t exist. The right-wing party said: “You are supporting terrorism. We have to stop supporting you!”
AC: The “Dadaism, Anarchism, Terrorism!” in their mind worked.
AN: We fulfilled the self-fulfilling prophecy, yes! Luckily, we were not prosecuted for the “glorification of terrorism.”
There was another project with sex expert Maggie Tappert, who is specialized in the female orgasm and does workshops. For these workshops she made a casting for the men who would be part of her workshop. It was quite interesting to see how old men, members of the city government, and our board got so upset about this that they went directly to the press and let us know via the press that we were not allowed to do it.
So, we had a terrorism scandal, a sex scandal, and a vandalism scandal. Then the mayor of the City of Zurich said that the board should dismiss my boss Phillip (Meier). Therefore, the solution of our board was to say that we would have a co-direction (of him and myself). I was already doing shows, like the Dada East? The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire exhibition, or organized conferences, like the Symposium Merzbau (May 7, 2005). That’s how I became the co-director. Then in 2012, when we invited Chto Delat for the first time and made a show with them, when we also had members of the Voina group as well as Reverend Billy, Yes Men, and a lot of other activists as guests and did actions with them, we went into a financial crisis. One could say, cleaning the big banks in Zurich because of the dirty business they do is not too good for sponsoring. We didn’t have any sponsors anymore, because we didn’t manage to find new ones, and we had a debt of 120,000 CHF. Therefore, Phillip said he would leave, because we were two directors with 80% employment—which means 160% employment for the director’s position. After Philipp had left, I was reduced to half of my job (40%) with the idea to resurrect the institution by focusing more on the historical aspects of Dada and, therefore, prepare the Jubilee in 2016 and to make Cabaret Voltaire a more established institution. So, that is how I became the director. Being stubborn and ignoring all the signs that were against the place.
AC: And believing in Dada!?
AN: Yes! I had devoted my whole life to Dada. Dada was my religion.
Elena Vogiatzi: What role, according to you, does Dadaism play in our time?
AN: For me? NONE! That’s why I left (laughs). I mean this is a question that has been asked a lot. A question one can answer in a lot of different ways. One can understand Dada as an art movement that happened form 1916 until 1923. As an art movement, one can say, in hindsight, that it influences other art movements and artists, and therefore has something like a heritage line of Dada, Surrealism, Bauhaus, Fluxus up through performance art today. One could say it has importance today because performance is everywhere nowadays. One can also say that Dada is an idea. The idea of Dada is not to say yes nor no, but maybe something third. It’s a kind of a queer idea. To not be left and to not be right, but to be vertical, as Dadaist Walter Mehring said, when asked about his political views. So, it has a strong importance today, in its idea of queerness, in the idea of dissolving the masculine dialectics. Not being left or right, good or bad, black or white, male or female, but to aim for a third possibility and to be in-between everything.
Also, there is another explanation, in which I can refer to Kurt Schwitters, who said, that one can say Dada in three different ways: Dáda, Dada or Dadá. Dáda sounds very vulgar, like a drunk Swiss local politician would sound or men’s locker room talk. Therefore, Schwitters says: “Dáda is the style of our times, and our time doesn’t have any style.” In that sense, if one looks at the current president of the United States, or other world leaders, one can say that they are “Super Dádas.” It is mainly vulgar people who are in power, so in a way Dáda is all over us. Additionally, I think nowadays that the detachment of sense and content from communication is very common. It has become very difficult to find and make sense and to understand things in our times.
Kurt Schwitters says: “Dada sounds indifferent,” something an art critic would say; it doesn’t really matter.
Dadá, however, has élan and drive and verve, it sounds French, very metropolitan, and urban. Schwitters concludes that Dáda makes a diagnosis of our times, Dáda is the medicine against our Dáda time. So, we can say, we need to get rid of Dada and have more Dáda, that is dynamic and queer, to fight Dáda. Or as Hannah Hoch’s painting from 1919 says: Cut with the kitchen knife Dáda through the last Weimar beer-belly cultural era.
AC: Dada as a concept can nearly be used as an analytical tool.
AN: That’s a little bit what I have been trying to do with Dada in recent years. To use it as a tool and to maybe even find certain characters or personas, functions and interests, like the trickster, for example, or a joker or even a dandy. It can also be a female dandy. Also, I am not really a feminist, but I think that Dada is a very feminist idea. It dissolves masculine dialectics and tries to seek a more holistic approach.
AC: Have you been focusing your program around that idea? You have been presenting a lot of performances for the last couple of years; you had also female artists represented. How did you build your program, departing from that more theoretical idea?
AN: I didn’t have a totally female-oriented program, no. I developed the theoretical idea more or less when I became director. We didn’t really have many contemporary art exhibitions until 2016. Then we had the 100-year Jubilee of Dada in 2016 and for me after that, Dada was everywhere and I thought now everybody understands it, so we can carry on. In my opinion, performance was a logical step referring to the heritage line that I described before, but also because during the Jubilee we made a show and performance program together with Una Szeemann, where we had a copper stage in the cellar of Cabaret Voltaire with the idea that copper as a conductor can revitalize the ancient Dada heritage and bring the place into the here and now. Performance deals with a lot of queer, gay, and gender topics, personal identities, question of bodies, communities, and microhistories. It has a very fragile and almost experimental status, despite the fact that nowadays performance is everywhere. One can also say that all performance artists are to a certain degree dilettantes, because they are trying things that they do not know or master. They leave their comfort zones and expose themselves to their panic zones. The Dadaists did similar things and therefore promoted dilettantism a lot. So, the idea of starting a performance program after the Jubilee was about arriving in the here and now and not only look back at a moment that happened a century ago. I wanted to show that we can take the whole one hundred years and to maybe start thinking about the next one hundred years.
AC: You had quite a mix of ages in your program?
AN: Yes. We had a lot of very young artists, but also a lot of old white men. When one looks back into what we did more than ten years ago, today one would say it was racist or sexist. There was one year, 2008, where we had a lot of old white men coming. There were exhibitions and events with Christoph Schlingensief, Jonathan Meese, Peter Weibel, Franz West, Maurizio Cattelan, Werner Nekes, and so on, all men! We were too focused on using these people as eminent authorities, glorifying them, and, because most of them had that mansplaining notion about them, also learn from them. Explaining the world to us, what art is, what architecture is, what the future will be. Later, we worked with a lot of activists and political artists. Also, my co-director Philipp was very much into social media from early on, and we also worked with a lot of media artists. These are just some examples, but in retrospect it is very fascinating to see the Zeitgeist being reflected in what we were doing, and sometimes we even managed to be at the forefront of it.
EV: Can we ask you about your audience? Do you believe that the audience is evolving or changing?
AN: I can only speak for Cabaret Voltaire, but when we started with this performance program two years ago, it would generate a lot of younger people, hipsters, cool people coming from the outskirts of Zurich, the local art scene would start to come to Cabaret Voltaire. Before that and because we had a very diverse program in terms of events, sometimes we would have a room full of over 60-year-olds, another time it would be full of Russian radicals. To a certain degree, I think our audience was more diverse before we started focusing on performance. Performance is a niche. It only attracts a certain kind of people.
But also, by renting out the space, by having the bar and by doing tours, we had bankers, teachers, pupils, advertisers, local associations, business clubs, city and state clerks, and so on coming.
AC: When did you start renting out the space? Did you also involve other curatorial or art practitioners in your program? Did you rent out the space on a regular basis?
AN: From the beginning in 2004, we always collaborated with others. At the beginning (with the financial support of Swatch), we could even support the external events and involvements financially, and organize events together with other institutions, art spaces, magazines, or individuals.
Then with the time, we started renting out the space for cultural events. To cover the running costs of such an event, one would have to pay 500 CHF and then one could do whatever one wanted. It was a totally uncurated, open space.
For the Jubilee, we wanted to focus more on our own program and give it a clearer profile, so we only rented out the space for private events and charged them very high fees (4,000 CHF). That concept worked, we didn’t lose any money, but we had fewer events like weddings, birthday parties, business think tank workshops, a lot of company Christmas dinners, and some hackathons, that didn’t disturb our own program. Besides, in 2016 we also took over the bar. So, to a certain degree it was more lucrative to just have the bar open, especially towards the weekends. However, we had certain partnerships, with institutes from the universities like the Zentrum der Künste und Kulturtheorie, Zentrum Geschichte des Wissens (ZGW). We focused on having academic partners, which are, especially the ZGW, very up to date on political debates and current topics. It made more sense to collaborate with people who know what they are talking about, instead of doing it on one’s own.
AC: Maybe now that you are “gone” from the Cabaret Voltaire, you could recall and tell us something about what you had been doing before these fifteen years of being there?
AN: Before my time at the Cabaret Voltaire, I was a student at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, ZHdK. I studied Theory of Art and Design and basically came to the Cabaret directly from studying. It was my first job. I only had one job until now. Before that, I studied Art in Bremen and I wanted to become an artist. Which is funny because now that I am done with Dada, I am also connecting more to what I was doing before. But first I think I need to go some distance to be able to understand what I have been doing for the last fifteen years. I have the feeling that it could be worth putting this practice into a different narrative. I have often perceived it as a job, doing one project after the other, but it would be nice to see it as a story one could tell. Also, it seems that what I have been preaching the last fifteen years in the name of Dada had a deep impact on me, which I can start understanding and actively using now. I feel like I have become a real experimenting subject of my own interpretation of and special interest in Dada.
AC: You don’t want to become an artist anymore?
AN: It is difficult as a curator to then become an artist. The only titles I still have are, on the one side, Chevalier de la Tombe de Bakunin—I am together with nine others sharing the responsibility of Mikhail Bakunin’s grave in Bern—and on the other side, I am King Adrian I of Elgaland-Vargaland. I was previously an ambassador of the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland, which is a kingdom composed of all borders. That can be political borders, state borders, but also the borders between life and death, between consciousness and unconsciousness, between languages and so on. So, basically, it is the Kingdoms of everything in-between. Elga means elk and Varga means wolf in Swedish. It is a project by Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Leif Elggren, two Swedish artists who founded the Kingdoms in the nineties. Because I had been doing a lot for the Kingdoms—we annexed Lake Constance in 2008, and in 2016 we annexed all of Switzerland as a border—I was announced to become one of the seven kings and queens. So, what I need to do now is to write the adventures of King Adrian I of Elgaland-Vargaland in two epic books. One is the story of how Adrian became King Adrian I, which is an adventurous tale starting in my puberty up through December 2019, when I stopped working at Cabaret Voltaire. The second book describes the travels of King Adrian I of Elgaland-Vargaland in his Kingdoms, adventures in all spaces in-between, in interference, for example, in the space between languages, but also in Utopia or in the land of milk and honey (Schlaraffenland). I think that this in-between space is a vast space of the imagination. So, I don’t want to be an artist. I want to be a King!
AC: That’s amazing!
At the time you took on the position at the Cabaret Voltaire, were you a friend of Phillip’s or acquainted with him?
AN: We had been doing projects together before, Phillip and I. He was originally a gardener, a landscape architect, no academic. He was a practitioner, had studied art at the F+F in Zurich and was known in the city as a club curator who organized artistic events in clubs. He hired me because I had studied theory. He thought that he could use me as a “theoretical backup.”
Also, in my diploma work, I tried to establish a new art term, which was called “Die Installative Event Skulptur,” that was based a lot on our collaboration before Cabaret Voltaire and on his works as a club curator. Looking back, I realize that all I have been doing in Cabaret Voltaire was maybe just about erecting this installative event-sculpture.
AC: A “club curator” sounds exciting! It is very interesting how the term curator/curating is used nowadays. The Zoo of Zurich, for instance, also has a curator, Dr. Robert Zingg! In what way is it necessary for a zoo to have a curator? He is giving a theoretical background to what the zoo is doing; he is a scientist. He is basically doing the same thing that a curator is doing in a museum, just in a zoo.
AN: But the zoo is a museum. It is the museum of animals. It is also part of the association of Zurich Museums.
AC: That is really interesting!
EV: What will you miss the most about running the Cabaret Voltaire?
AN: Well, I had been missing a lot while running the space. I missed the beginnings, when we received more funding and also the curiosity about the topic, because when I started, I didn’t know anything about Dada. I was like a naive Dada pilgrim travelling to the places these things happened back then. I will miss the easy access to artists I had thanks to working at Cabaret Voltaire, the birthplace of Dada. That is a great passe-partout that one should try and use as much as possible. What I loved doing was going to visit artists and diving into crazy stories. I just came from Amsterdam, where I was visiting Carlos Amorales. I have been working with him since the first project we did in 2009 (I got to know him in 2008). Since then, we have been engaged in a very long conversation (laughing). Back then in 2009, we went traveling by train together to all the Hans Arp archives and exhibitions in Europe. We traveled by train to Locarno, Strasbourg, Rolandeck, Hanover, Kassel, and Paris and we talked about what we had seen while trying to develop a project together. It seemed very old-fashioned, but I liked it a lot, working very closely with artists and trying to get into their fascinating stories and help from them.
AC: What do you think was most problematic about the space as an institution in Zurich?
AN: I think you already gave the answer: “in Zurich.” That’s the most problematic aspect. I noticed that basically it was a lot of fun, very exciting and interesting to do all the projects, but there was always this problem of the support from the side of the city. I am not only talking about the financial support, because we can observe a lot of cultural spaces that always have financial problems anyway, but it is more the mental support that I found missing. For the whole duration of me working there, Cabaret Voltaire has never really arrived in the city, and I never understood what the problem exactly was. How come the city doesn’t really accept this space, nor support it like any other art space that is internationally less known? There was never any real generosity or openness for Cabaret Voltaire. It was more fear that was driving the local politicians and the administration, even when we had two successful referendums with more than 60% of positive votes. Meanwhile, the local scene ignored it, because it seemed more like a tourist attraction than an art space. The city has been supporting Cabaret Voltaire over the last fifteen years with always the same amount as in 2004. We made this whole Jubilee in 2016, thinking that then they would understand the importance of the space. Instead the left-wing politicians, the “Alternative Liste” asked: “Why does Cabaret Voltaire have to be where it is? Why can’t we do it in Altstetten?” (laughing), and I said: “Well, because it is the birthplace and you can’t move a birthplace.” One could notice a total Dada overkill in Zurich for years, Zurich tourism exploited it like hell, but it just didn’t arrive in their heads.
In a way the failure of Cabaret Voltaire is actually inscribed in the history of it: it can never, at least mentally, fit into the city, and that is basically what we have been fighting for the last fifteen years. But Cabaret Voltaire stayed always in-between everything. So, the failure of properly establishing Cabaret Voltaire in the city was actually a success.
AC: Then again, inducing fear can also be a very powerful tool. But, of course, if you want to function as an institution and not as an artist-run space, then it is probably a bit problematic.
AN: Yes, also with the mentality that we have in Zurich; even if you induce fear, there is no reaction. It is not like if you do it in Germany, or even in Russia, where there will be a lot of discussions or fights. Here, one just mostly looks the other way. Fear is not so productive. Also, irony or ambivalence are things that don’t work here. If they do, then only in private social contexts. This kind of mentality seems very U.S.-like, where you declare when you make a joke, and you are full of professional enthusiasm about everything all the time.
EV: Do you recall a particularly challenging event or an event that made an impact, in your opinion?
AN: It depends where it made an impact. One of the toughest things I did was to do an exhibition in Moscow, Rewriting Worlds: Dada Moscow, during the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, with about fifteen artists. It was very difficult to work with the people there. Also, I think that, for me, it’s very difficult to figure out what had an impact and in what sense, because I am too much in it. Furthermore, I am very bad at self-marketing, so I can’t really say.
A.C.: I don’t think you are that bad (laughing). Was it difficult to work with the Russian authorities, the Russian audience, or the artists?
AN: No, not the artists! It was difficult to work with the construction people and customs, etc. It was extremely difficult on a very practical level. I learned from the Slovenian artist, IRWIN, that you need to yell at the people, or else they won’t do anything, and, of course, a lot of things, like the customs, could’ve been solved with some extra money, so to say. As a whole experience, it was very tough.
I want to use Carlos (Amorales) again as an example. One could say that this tour that we did in 2009, to Hans Arp archives, didn’t really have an impact on him at that very moment, but it had an impact a lot of years later, when he started working with printing and doing collages, using coincidence in his work. That was six years later. I also did a project once with Rainer Ganahl, an Austrian artist living in New York, who wanted to come to Cabaret Voltaire and read Marx. I told him that he couldn’t read Marx at Cabaret Voltaire, it would make more sense to read Lenin, because he was our neighbor. So, we were reading Lenin, and out of that a whole body of work developed, which he has been engaged with for about ten years: Dadalenin. So, the impacts are very subtle, but some artists have been influenced by what we did together.
AC: So, for you as a curator, it was really this interaction with the artists that you can look back at?
AN: Yes exactly, to see how one can infiltrate certain art practices, and how years later something comes out of it. I think it is a dialogue, because on one side, I am very interested in what they are doing, and on the other side they might get something out of what I could offer. IRWIN, for example, started to paint religious icons after they did a show in Cabaret Voltaire, where we worked on Hugo Ball’s book about three saints, called Byzantine Christianity. It’s like an exchange: I get to understand their work, to collaborate with them, and they get something out of working together with me, with Dada.
AC: Does Cabaret Voltaire have an archive? A digital or physical archive?
AN: Yes, the analogue archive of the past fifteen years is in the city archive of Zurich. Also, we scanned more or less everything and put it online on https://cabaretvoltaire.kleio.com/.
AC: You invited quite a lot of international artists for a Zurich institution. Do you think that was a problem as well?
AN: Yes. I invited more international artists than Swiss artists. It was just because I was more interested in international artists and maybe also because they were more interested in working with this heritage. Of course, this was strategically not very clever, because one neglects the local scene. Once I did a project where I had twelve Zurich artists involved, and it was so easy to have the audience, to get articles in magazines, in newspapers, and to get the funding. It is very simple; we are social beings and we go more easily to see the projects that friends do and not merely out of curiosity. It is also difficult, almost impossible, to find funding for international artists doing something here. In a way, funding systems are very nationalistic. In Zurich, you can only work with Swiss or Zurich-based artists, because foundations have this as a criteria. I find it very problematic to basically only support your own national identity.
Of course, in the last fifteen years, the idea of sponsoring and supporting art projects has changed a lot. Now, it’s a lot more work to get a small amount of money. In 2018, we applied for funding at over 100 different foundations with five totally different projects, to then finally get around 30,000 CHF in total. When we (Cabaret Voltaire) started, one would still have opportunities to get 100,000 or 50,000 more easily. It was a lot more trust-based back then, and less about controlling. Swatch, for example, gave us 330,000 CHF a year. On top of that, they made Dada Swatches, and then we got royalties, of again approx. 30,000 CHF a year. Somehow, the understanding that art has an importance and value of its own was bigger. Today, we talk a lot more about the importance and value of art, but mainly, one could say, to question it and to apply different criteria to evaluate art that often don’t have anything to do with it.
AC: Why did Swatch stop supporting you? Because of all these scandals (that you mentioned at the start of our conversation)?
AN: First of all, the reason for not setting up a new contract was, as I was told, that they were not happy with the way the city treated them. It had something to do with parking lots in front of one of their office buildings in the center of the city. A weird story, I cannot really remember. On the other side, there was this idea that Hayek Jr. had of Dada, as a rebellious art movement that could feed the legend of Swatch as a rebellious watch brand. So, maybe we just didn’t really fulfill the cliché image that he had in mind.
AC: You mentioned your plans to write. Any other plans for the future?
AN: My plan is to not have a plan. As Hugo Ball said: orgiastic devotion to the opposite of everything that is useful and necessary.
Monte Verità, Jonathan Meese, Bazon Brock, Harald Falckenberg (Performance)
Prozession Paul Polaris (Invent the Future WIth Elements of the Past)
KREV, Annexation of Switzerland
Adrian Notz (b. 1977, Zurich) is a freelance curator, King of Elgaland-Vargaland and Chevalier de la Tombe de Bakunin. From 2012 to 2019, he was director of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. He worked there first as a curatorial assistant from 2004, and from 2006 to 2012 as co-director. From 2010 to 2015, he was Head of the Department for Fine Arts at Schule für Gestaltung in St. Gallen. Since 2007, Notz has been a diplomat of NSK State, and from 2008 to 2018, he was Ambassador of the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland for Zurich. He has curated numerous Dada and contemporary art exhibitions mostly at Cabaret Voltaire but also internationally. His latest show is End of Future / Fin del Futuro, with Heba Y. Amin (AE), Carlos Amorales (MX), Mihai Barabancea (RO), Beni Bischof (CH), Alexander Brener (KZ) & Barbara Schurz (AT), Thomas Hirschhorn (CH), Elsa Louise Manceaux (FR), Jonathan Meese (DE), Anca Munteanu Rimnic (RO), Ciprian Muresan (RO), Janiv Oron (CH), Christodoulos Panayiotou (CY), Augustin Rebetez (CH), Jorge Satorre (MX), Melanie Smith (UK), Lena Maria Thüring (CH) and Antonio Vega Macotela (MX), at SAPS La Tallera, Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Anastasia Chaguidouline is a curator, art mediator, and nomad. Currently based in France, she holds a BA in Fine Arts from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, an MA in Arts from Institut Kunst, Basel, and a MAS in Curating from the ZHdK, Zurich. She currently works as a curatorial assistant in the Museum Tinguely, Basel, and as an art mediator for the Kunstmuseum Winterthur and Art Basel. Her contributions have been published in The Contemporary Condition series (Sternberg Press) and the OnCurating journal.
Elena Vogiatzi studied theater and visual arts in Athens, Greece (Deree-The American College of Greece, 2010) and the U.K. (University of Exeter, 2012). In 2020, she completed the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, CAS, at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). She is currently working as a freelance artist and curator in Athens, Greece.