Art, Culture and Mobility

Since 2022, I have been part of a four-year research project about disability, the performing arts and mobility titled ‘Aesthetics of the Im/Mobile’, which is financed by SFN at the University of the Arts Bern. The project aims to explore the possibilities and impossibilities of travel in the performing arts, and the different ways artists and productions travel – or don’t travel. My colleagues interviewed theatres and festivals – most of them in Switzerland, with a few exceptions, but all of them in the German-speaking part of Europe. In their interviews, as well as looking through materials such as websites and programmes, they researched how theatres and festivals reacted when the Covid-19 pandemic made the usual traveling of productions no longer possible, and whether this created more permanent structural changes to the ways institutions work.