Ten Important Events In My Life

Mats Staub’s first web-based long-term project began in 2013 with two interconnected formats: as an open access online collection and in exhibitions of posters. Both formats were intended to encourage visitors to make their own contributions to the collection of important events. They were all invited to participate and given these instructions:

1. Make a note of today’s date.
2. Write down your first name and the year you were born.
3. Write down all the places you have lived in chronological order. Indicate which one(s) you are currently living in.
4. Write down all the jobs you have been paid for in chronological order. Indicate which one(s) you are currently doing.
5. Decide on ten really important events in your life. They don’t have to be THE ten most important ones, simply the ten important events you want to list today.
6. Describe each event as briefly as you can. Try to describe just the moment of the event itself. You don’t need to provide comments or explanations. Use the present tense and the first-person singular (I…).
7. Place the events in chronological order. Date them by month and year. If you don’t know the exact month, provide an estimate.
8. Change any names you don’t want the world at large to recognise. You can also change your own name.
9. Send your list per E-Mail or use the form provided on ten-important-events-in-my-life.net

Each submission was read and edited by two members of the team: firstly to ensure the chronology was maintained and the jobs written out uniformly, secondly, to see if events were described in over-explanatory or excessively cryptic terms. In that case, the participants would be asked follow-up questions by email and cuts or revisions would be suggested. The list would only be published on the website once both sides were satisfied with the edited version.    

Individual lists were printed in world format and arranged to suit each space in poster exhibitions, with each list seen exclusively at one venue. Single events were placed on posters in public spaces for the first time in Frankfurt am Main in 2014, and again in Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile in 2017.

From January 2017, a new website was created for the Spanish language collection under the domain diezmomentos.net, which was more explicitly aimed to be seen on mobile phones. Altogether some 400 lists have been published on the websites in which the 4000 events can be displayed by year, place or topic.

Due to the project’s considerable editorial requirements, no further lists have been collected–but everybody is still invited to follow the instructions, just the last two points changed:

8. Keep the list in a safe place.
9. Look at it again in a year’s or in five years’ time. Which new events belong on the list? Which ones can be replaced to keep the total number at ten?

The book Zehn wichtigste Ereignisse meines Lebens (in German only) is a collection of one thousand important events: Mats Staub arranged a selection of one hundred lists by year of birth, from Charlotte, born in 1922, to Resa, born in 1994–and in a chronology that forms a personal and incomplete world history from April 1931 to March 2014.

Elster & Salis (2014)
Broschur, 396 pages, vierfarbig, 11.5×17cm

“It’s art–and everyone’s invited. This is wonderful.”
SRF 2 Kultur, 15.11.2014

“The individual entries are short and succinct and this laconic, direct style is enormously powerful. What happens is the whole of life–that sometimes consists of tiny poetic moments.”
SRF 2 Kultur, 13.03.2013