Holidays

In Holidays Mats Staub asks people personal questions about their lives while reducing their answers to a bare minimum: counting. For each question, a video shows people in a range of ages who have just been asked this question, thinking about it and then answering quickly or slowly with a number.

In each case the task for the participants was to define the terms employed in the question for themselves in silence (what does “in love” or “rely on” mean for me?) and then answer as precisely as possible with a number. While they review their lives, the broadest range of emotions can be seen in their faces: people can be seen in the process of remembering and questioning themselves, and one can sense that a great deal has been lived out and felt behind that number – which at the same time protectively veils their actual experience.

In 2022/23 Mats Staub had the opportunity to update the work in a new context, as Artist in Residence at the University of St. Gallen in its newly opened Square. People associated with the university (students, administrative staff, professors etc.) answered 18 questions at the beginning of December 2022. The videos were then played on the information screens which can be found on the three floors of the university’s new building and which visitors check every day. One year later, Mats Staub asked some 20 participants the same questions again and then presented the recordings from both years as an installation in the atrium and in the online version: now the same face can be seen, having aged one year, and the frequent variations in their answers are the result not only of the events of that year, but of a reassessment of what has gone before. 

“The face becomes a location for theatre. The interviewees become surfaces onto which audiences can project stories or think of their own experiences. This stimulating installation encourages thought and conversations with other people about the trickiest questions.”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 21.01.2011

“One can approach this clever installation with the ambition of a detective, in a spirit of playful self-examination or out of sociological interest. Or one can also delegate the answers and watch those who are questioned thinking, counting silently and commenting on their own lives in the form of numbers.”
Tages-Anzeiger, 21.01.2011

Initiative, Concept, Direction: Mats Staub
Camera: Matthias Stickel, Benno Seidel
Producer: zwischen_produktionen