About Us
We are not a collective in the formal sense, but in the spirit of colligere — «to gather, compile» — we are an informal community of interest that shares the space, sometimes the time, often the materials, and occasionally/at times the witnesses, audience, or listeners.
«Art is what we do.
Culture is what is done to us»
Carl Andre, 1968
Valerian Maly & Klara Schilliger
Artists Klara Schilliger (*1953, Sursee) and Valerian Maly (*1959, Tübingen), presently based in Bern and La Chaux-de-Fonds, have lived and worked together since 1984 in the fields of performance art and installation. For certain works — often involving the direct participation of the audience or local partners — they use the term «InstallAction.» These intermedia installations and performances are frequently, though not exclusively, site-specific interventions, preceded by project-based research. Klara Schilliger and Valerian Maly move naturally across different genres of the arts without succumbing to the temptations of excessive multimedia overload: «It is necessary to find a position amid the turbulences of values from which art arises.» (Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New)
GingerEnsemble
The GingerEnsemble, comprised of Valerian Maly, Seiji Morimoto, Klara Schilliger, and Lara Stanic, is dedicated to the «historically informed performance» of experimental music — drawing inspiration, among others, from the «Sonic Arts Union» — as well as to the creation of new site-specific and situation-specific works. The Bern-based ensemble was founded in 2010 during the InstallAction «Monument GingerSociety» at the Kunstmuseum Thun by Klara Schilliger and Valerian Maly together with Lara Stanic and Cyrill Lim. Since then, the GingerEnsemble has appeared numerous times at Musikfestival Bern and at other important venues for contemporary music, including Walcheturm Zürich, Gare du Nord Basel, ABC La Chaux-de-Fonds, and Rex Belgrade. The ensemble has also toured in various constellations with artists including Miša Savić, David Behrman and Peter Streiff.
Barbara Balba Weber
Project «Lottery Orchestra»
Music educator Barbara Balba Weber brings Performance Space 369 to life, usually on Sundays, with her «Lottery Orchestra».
In a kind of «open training session» professional and non-professional artists, young and old, meet once a month on a Sunday afternoon. Together, they reinterpret folk songs, workers’ songs, Schubert Lieder, and more, bringing together diverse communities from the city of Bern and the surrounding region. They use a special instrumentarium of everyday objects and broken musical instruments transformed into figures and masks.
Francesco Muzio
«The tedious thing about infinity is that it lasts so long. Especially toward the end.»
Wisdom has its charm, Francesco Muzio believes. He has always been fascinated and delighted by his own existence. The desire to share this attitude with others has shaped his professional life. Over the years, he has gathered a wide range of experiences — Zen meditation, martial arts, breath dance, laughter workshops, a passion for the didgeridoo, and countless advisory sessions — into his personal treasure chest. Before retiring, he taught «Reset» at the HKB for twenty years, many of them in what is now Performance Space 369. Today, he practices silent martial arts there with like-minded companions and also uses the spaciousness of the room for conversations that require openness.
takes advantage of the space’s openness to have conversations that need room to unfold.
Over the years, he has collected a rich assortment of practices and experiences — Zen meditation, martial arts, breath dance, laughter workshops, a passion for the didgeridoo, and countless advisory conversations — all stored metaphorically in his «treasure chest.”
Before retirement, he taught for twenty years at the HKB program Reset, many of those years in what is now Performance Space 369. Today, he practices silent martial arts there with like-minded peers and takes advantage of the space’s generosity to hold conversations that require openness and expansiveness.
Zoë Binetti
In her artistic practice, Zoë Binetti explores embodied relationships among music, touch, dance, light, material,
and space.
Each Monday evening, she leads a three-hour Butoh and sensory theater training session at Performance Space 369.
In the first part, participants train the physical foundations needed to dance the topographies at the interface between
the outer and inner worlds. In the second part, they listen, touch, and dance their way deeper into these in-between worlds. In the final part, they share with one another the
absurd poetry discovered there.
No prior experience is required.