Metzgergasse 2011 | Trailer

The immediate vicinity of a theatre–a picturesque street in the town’s old quarter or a bustling urban square–are declared an exhibition and visitors are given an audio guide that tells them stories of the previous residents or businesses that occupied each building. Highly contrasting life stories, generations, social backgrounds and perspectives meet with the multiple narrators being connected by living or working in the same place.  

Mats Staub devised the ‘audio viewin’ format in Bern in 2011 in the former Metzgergasse, now called Rathausgasse as the original name was notorious throughout Switzerland as a red-light district. He spent several months living there in the Schlachthaus Theater’s artists’ accommodation, doing his shopping in the street, drinking his morning coffee there and gradually getting to know the residents and shop owners. The conversations were each held in the participants’ living or working spaces and lasted between one and five hours. Mats Staub edited them into stories with a total length of some seven hours, spoken by over forty people. The dramaturgy had no prescribed running order: the visitors could decide for themselves where to start, how to navigate their way through the street, who to listen to and for how long.

This project was followed in 2012 by an audio viewing in the Bundesplatz near Lucerne’s Kleintheater, a forlorn thoroughfare with a toilet block at the centre. Here too, visitors could navigate their own way with an iPod, spend time at the Erdem Kebab, Pfaff Photo Studio or the barred windows of the Serbian Cultural Association and listen to the edited original voices of people who lived or worked there.

1/1

Metzgergasse 2011 was extended two years later as Metzgergasse 2011/13, in which the stories from 2011 were presented along with newly added ones, thus highlighting the changes that the street had undergone: The Peep Store had closed down, Coiffure Walter had been forced to make way for a beer bar and the restaurant Alte Post that had been vacant in 2011 was now a dry cleaner’s. This audio viewing offered a direct experience of how stories and places vanish and new ones arrive and how different a street can sound over time.

Credits

Initiative, Concept, Direction: Mats Staub
Colaboration: Evelyne Zinsstag (Bern); Nadine Tobler (Luzern)
Programming iPods: Erik Thurnherr
Production Manager: Judith Rohrbach
With support from: KulturStadtBern, Kanton Bern, Migros-Kulturprozent (Metzgergasse); Fuka-Fonds Stadt Luzern, Kanton Luzern, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Kopp Maus Stiftung, Migros-Kulturprozent, Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft der Stadt Luzern (Bundesplatz)

Back
Next