22.– 26. Mai 2018, täglich 10–13h
Dachterasse, Kaskadentreppen, Parkgarage und im gesamten Toni-Areal

Performances & Workshop
Open to performative artists in other departments,
contact: kaspar.koenig@zhdk.ch

Diego Kohn: Workshop Assistent
Kaspar König: Workshopleiter

DKV, MA Transdisciplinary + DMU BA & MA Music

Toni is thought of as a creative city, but what’s missing is the street musician
The street musician accompanies your day for a short while, planting a melody in your head for the day. Let’s bottom-up Toni with an inverted street music festival. Let the soul talk to its inhabitants. Imagine being a street musician (existing in a diverse variety) in those endless floors and staircases in Toni. Somewhere lost between bureaus, ateliers, and cafeteria, your instrument on your back, why not try to intervene in those paces or places with some simple notes and tunes.

Diego Kohn and Kaspar König will be going around to listen and guide people to some unique sonic and music moments when possible each day of the workshop (between 10–13h daily).

Kaspar König asks: if the Toni-Areal is designed to be a creative city, complete with a museum, a post office, cafés and restaurants, an Apple store, etc., then where are the street musicians? Over the course of a week-long workshop, he will work with improvising musicians, challenging them to step out of the shelter and security of the concert hall and practice room, and interlace with the diversity of the sonic environment surrounding them. By doing this, the street musicians disturbs the forced collectivity of the mini-creative-city’s corridors, elevators, and unnoticed spaces, eliciting the spontaneous small interactions that define a community.

Street musicians create inter/ludes, a word-for-word “playing between” the spaces in the itineraries of passers-by. In the subway, they transform generic underground corridors into an impromptu stage, using the cavernous spaces to amplify their singular voices – note here the semantic overlap between the underground and counter-cultures, revolutions, and the marginalized. These ad-hoc stages also make a kind of interruption, a break, in their routine. This break, this unexpected twist, is part of what makes the difference between what could just be the yoghurt- or degree-factory, and the ideal of the truly creative city.