Latifa Echakhch wants it to be a surprise. The Swiss-based Moroccan-born artist’s work for this year’s Art Basel Messeplatz commission is an empty, deconstructed stage. “It will look like a big empty installation, a silent installation,” she says. The arts journal. That is, until the performers show up. The work – titled Allplatz, loosely translated as “space for all” – will host intermittent performances of experimental classical music. As fair goers meet friends and associates in the square, or the public waits for one of Basel’s streetcars, musicians, including Brooklyn-based cellist and sound artist Leila Bordreuil, will pull out their bows.
Echakhch also hopes the sounds will be just as unexpected as their performance, recreating her own epiphanic feeling of stumbling to this “strange music” when she was 21. She names Pierre Henry, Alvin Curran, Terre Thaemlitz, Mika Vainio, Ryoji Ikeda as some of the artists she found early on. She is curious how the music will be received by people who happen to hear it.
“The hardest part is that people may not be ready to hear what I’m going to present”
Latifa Echakhch, artist
The artist began working on this project after the closing of his exhibition at the Venice Biennale The concert. In a radical departure from her previous work, she approached it as a ‘musician’ rather than a ‘visual artist’, filling the Swiss pavilion with experimental sounds, harmonies and dissonances. She wanted visitors to leave with “the same feeling as when leaving a concert”.
The difference is that by the time Biennale visitors arrived at the Swiss pavilion, they at least partially knew what to expect. At Art Basel, however, “people are ready to see art; the hardest thing about this commission is that people, even those in the art world, may not be ready to hear what I’m going to present,” she says. Indeed, this is the essence of work; how a space, much like a musical composition, can be pushed beyond the limits of expectation.
Middle ground
Basically, the stage – with its 360-degree view – is free and open to everyone, even those without a fair pass. This was important for the artist, who points out that the Messeplatz does not belong to the fair. “It’s part of the Allmend [or the ‘common’, meaning it belongs to the canton of Basel],” she says, “literally translating to ‘that which belongs to everyone’.”
Disorientation will be at the heart of these unpredictable reactions. You have before you a semi-collapsed scene, Echakhch reminds us. Some people may be wondering if it’s over or if they’re supposed to wait for something else, she adds. But this disorientation is meant to elicit feelings of “unease” and “catharsis.” Discomfort because the project asks the spectator to do a job of waiting, to face his imagination or to launch into a “projection”, as Echakhch describes it. And catharsis, since in the socially demanding and etiquette-laden world of the art fair, perhaps a little discomfort is what visitors need.
• Messeplatz project: Latifa EchakhchMesseplatz, throughout Art Basel
