Monte Verità & Friends
Praxisseminar für BA und MA
Wintersemester 2019/20
Leitung: Prof. Dr. Inge Hinterwalder
Studierende / Students: Mustafa-Emin Alkan, Julia Ernst, Mathilde Göttel, Eva Kallenberger, Özge Kaya, Anna Piazolo, Peter Seeland, Sophie Sulzer, Georg Vigier (mit je einer eigenen Teilvisualisierung).
The second edition of the series of the practical seminar "... & friends" again stuck to the motto theorybricolage. The course was dedicated to Monte Verità: a hill in Ticino near Ascona on Lake Maggiore, so named at the beginning of the 20th century. From the middle of the 19th century until the post-war period, that is for almost a century, this hill was a magnet for many revolutionaries and people tired of civilisation. Russian social strategists, life reformers, naturists and spiritualists advocated free relations, a vegetarian diet, theosophy, Clarism, anarchism and alternative lifestyles, renounced capitalism and industrialism. Illustrious and dazzling personalities from fine arts, literature, dance, theater and puppet theater gathered on site, cultivating a network with the bohemian and educated elite of Zurich and Munich. The aim of the seminar was to work out the diverse ideas projected onto the hill from the most diverse perspectives and at the same time to highlight the close connection between the protagonists. In order to convey these connecting lines in the best possible way, the students developed their main theses in visual form. In doing so, they dealt with the themes of the sanatoriums, the artists' colonies, the painter Marianne von Werefkin, the body images of that time, Dada, the dance community around Rudolf von Laban, anarchism, the writers, and the prototypical architecture built on the hill. A tent-mountain construction served as an integrating element, to which the individual visualizations were programmatically related.