The collective unspace is focusing on inviting performative practises to its current resident at Kunsthaus Zurich during June and July 2023. unspace is a newly formed collective attempting to develop hybrid formats focusing on experimental and performative works, methods and practices. Its interest lays in opening up space for performative works that are yet-in-progress and/or create relations to differentiated spaces. unspace was found and is currently run by Eliane Bertschi and Cathrin Jarema.

Check out our events and possibly visit us: https://www.unspace.live/

Musicvideo for Jon Hood
2022

Performed by Lara Dâmaso

Video directed, produced and edited: Eliane Bertschi
Co-directed and animated: Joerg Hurschler
Director of Photography: Alvaro Kreyden
Lights, Camera Assistance: Pascal Kohler
Color Grading: David Röthlisberger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr6-ptEVxxM

Hybrid Film, Doc-Fiction, 90'
2022-2024

Four places in Switzerland. Four local tales. Four seasons.
A mystical mix between the harsh reality of climate-change in the present and tales of the past. 


Crew

Direction: Eliane Bertschi
Assistant director: Lena Mäder
Direction of Camera: Alvaro Kreyden
Lights: Pascal Kohler
Sound: Florian Hinder
Producer Development: Leon Schwitter
Line Producer: Désirée Myriam Gnaba
Theater Pedagogy: Nina Büsser
Costumes: Valeri Kharbedia




With the support of:

Aargauer Kuratorium
Pro Helvetia
Anne-Marie Schindler Stiftung
Volkart Stiftung

Film (Lecture Performance - Expanded Cinema)


a lectured film journey that investigates on the fragility of time and its various perceptions illuminated by the contemplation of various measuring instruments. Transcripted in an area where myth and reality clash and nourish themselves to string with each other. A desert trip, a scientist, a stranger in a car, a farmer and a nebula floating in salty waters getting intertwined. 

Showings:
Neubad Luzern, Red Brick Chapel Night, 15.12.2019

Scenography for the Performance "Always coming hole" by Paula Amiron

Showings:
Batard Festival 2021, at Beursschouwburg, Brussels
Veem House of Performance, Amsterdam

Always coming hole is a choreographic reading space that travels between the virtual and the real spheres through the practices of writing, reading, and imagining. The project is part of a research around the interconnectedness of a group of bodies of water located in South America. It’s mostly a political exercise in taking a space as a point of departure, an act of listening to its movements and forces. As a first step, the project was presented online in the frame of Batard Festival in Brussels, where the work zooms in on Lake Poopo, a disappearing lake in Bolivia. As such, it starts with an end, and with the following question: if the lake would be a fictional character in a novel, how would its next life be?

Direction: Paula Almiron
Creation and performance: Ines Marita Schärer & Paula Almiron
Space Creation: Eliane Bertschi
Voices: Paula Pacheco, Alan Calle, Saul Apaza Chambi, Paula Almiron.
Video Mapping: Eliane Bertschi & Ruben Vandermeulen
Lights: Dorian Stevens
Technical support: Jan Berckmans & Ruben Vandermeulen
Videographer: Ely Chevillot, Camille Sultan & Carol Van Hemelrijck
Video editing: Eliane Bertschi
Video sound correction: Enrique Paredes
In conversation with Simon Asencio, Eliane Bertschi, Sabine Cmelniski, Wouter De Raeve, Fabrizia Fluhler, Caroline Godard, Lili M. Rampre, and Louise Vanneste.
With the support of La Bellone Maison de Spectacle, Kunstencentrum BUDA, Louise Vanneste Rising Horses, Villa Empain (Fondation Boghossian), Bâtard Festival – workspacebrussels – Pianofabriek.
Video recording: with the support of De Vlaamse Overheid and Bâtard Festival
​

Video Creation for the piece "Its me Frank" at Münchner Kammerspiele, 2020

Concept and authors: Eliane Bertschi, Anna Fierz, Julia Häusermann, Nele Jahnke, Mehdi Moradpour, Hans-Jakob Christian Mühlethaler, Maxi Schmitz, Sabina Winkler

While working Julia Häusermann calls herself “Frank,” after Frank Levinsky from the German television series “Verbotene Liebe” (“Forbidden Love”). But she’s much more than Frank and much more than Julia, the woman with Trisomie 21. She’s a medium, a performer who transforms into ghosts, pop icons, telenovela characters, machines, and entertainers. She moves, grieves, becomes furious, and laughs from the bottom of her heart with all of her senses. She playfully, obliviously, usurpingly, and affirmatively transcribes and transgresses images of self-improvement and norms attributed to womanliness.

Director: Nele Jahnke
Set and costume designer: Sabina Winkler
Musical director: Hans-Jakob Christian Mühlethaler
Video designer: Eliane Bertschi
Dramaturge: Mehdi Moradpour
Accompaniment and artistic collaboration: Anna Fierz
Photography: Maxi Schmitz
Concept and authors: Eliane Bertschi, Anna Fierz, Julia Häusermann, Nele Jahnke, Mehdi Moradpour, Hans-Jakob Christian Mühlethaler, Maxi Schmitz, Sabina Winkler

A collaboration with Theater HORA-Stiftung Züriwerk

Scratching, dust, clay

Shown at :
- Unaffected Interest 1-7, SB34 in Brussels, 17.01.- 01.02.2020
- To Grotto - Group Exhibition in Brussels, 14.02.2019




A work by Fabrizia Flühler and Eliane Bertschi







 

Book Publication

Within the navigation of campaigns this writing examines 7 events and their subliminal circling. 
In an archeological way of approaching, though in the aim to preserve its content, this work has a wish to find other narrations in the term of  event-hood. It examines the concept of how we perceive event. In the mis-understanding of perceiving history and time. Both macro and micro politically. Both in regard to human and non-human. Vital and non-vital.
It  examines how we consume information and list historically.
In 7 chapters it examines different systems of logic.

Which event does attend us?

1 The Explosion of the sun
2 Dying in Europe
3 A gaze touched lower back
4 The Architecture of building a nest
5
6 Eye for mollusk
7 Rumour about the shiest atom

A speculative Performance in three rooms

40 Minutes 2018
by Fabrizia Flühler and Eliane Bertschi in collaboration with Paula Almiron,
Shankar Lehéstran, Céline Shen, Elena Carvajal, Seelik Tristan Mutti, Camille Meyer

Showing: Centrale for Contemporary Arts, Brussels June 2018

A room of transformable problems is being pinned out; several room propositions levitating in one architectural space. This work is inhabiting a group of six performers and three rooms intra-acting within each other. What happens to Identity when an event of a catastrophe has suddenly infected a stable living condition? It seems the only constant acknowledged is change. How to become differently with everything sourrounding us? In the birth of this work lays an approach to question artistic authorship. The process was built out of a virus-host-like relationship and investigating the possibility of parasting the work of one another, this project opens a question on the constant intertwining of parasite and being parasitised in artistic creation and on the same limit of the notion of authorship. The performance lives in the scenery of a gloomy dark room. It inhabits the burning of a landscape that is screened on a levitating curtain above an opening of a floor, as the room once belonged to a ground operation. In this scenary a woman is doing her ritual of burning the levitating screen material. A transformed landscape emerges in the back of its event. The smell of poisonous texture accompanies the walk around the scenery. As a second room emerges and a group of six performers become visible; They find themselves busy in accomplishing movements. It tells from another tight. One could possibly measure the consistence of the air. Movements that gain to practise place-making. Runs through several time-zones. It is undoing culture - in order to look back to it from several perspectives. There is a system that slowly becomes visible in their movements which inhabits their bodies becoming a choreography. You notice a choreography that goes in and through the group. What exists through distortion? How does a choreography can get burned and dissolve into the space?
The ashes get turned into poems that  build a ritual to end the performance.

Excerpts
https://vimeo.com/307579401

Performance

35 minutes 2017
Eliane Bertschi in collaboration with André D. Chapatte

Showing: La Raffinerie, Brussels, June 2018
Zato Space, ETH Zurich Architecture Dept., March 2022

An inter-galactic meeting of two bodies questioning the materialistic space between them. 56 suns later reflects on the appearance of statues that cross territories, cultures and centuries representing a human expression onto rocky material. Statues represent a past not any longer graspable, representing the power of humans onto their surrounding.

With their ritualistic practise the bodies investigate on the movement of forms and deconstruct its definiteness . It is not clear if the performers are undoing a world, or constructing it for the first time. A garden with rare substance to put meaning on. 

Teaser
https://vimeo.com/262651454

Essayfilm

8 minutes directed and edited by Eliane Bertschi and Elias Gamma 

Synopsis
Pass on – whatever happens. Stand still – whatever happens. Her – The city. A definite glance, tar and stones. A silent body wanders through paths of toughts. Throw yourself into the world and get robbed. What remains is a language that keeps a stubborn silence.  

Stream
https://vimeo.com/199014955

Festivals
Winterthur, 18. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Swiss Competition and nominated for International Prizes, 2014 Berne, Museumsnacht Berne: Shortlist CS Förderpreis Videokunst, 2015 Zurich, 39. Schweizer Jugendfilmtage, Competition, 2015 Osnabrück, 28. European Media Art Festival Osnabrück, 2015 Lucerne, 12. Upcoming Film Makers Schweizer Jungfilmfestival Lucerne, Competition, 2015 Lissabon 3., Arquiteturas Film Festival Lisboa, 2015

Awards
Winterthur, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Special Mention (Schoolfilm Competition), 2014 Berne, Shortlist Credit Suisse Förderpreis Videokunst, 2015 Zurich, Schweizer Jugendfilmtage, 1. Prize Filmschools 2015  

Press Reviews

http://www.kulturkritik.ch/2014/opak-von-eliane-bertschi-und-elias-gamma/

Catalogue SWISS SHORTS 2015 - SWISS FILMS

Musicvideo for Jon Hood

in collaboration with Gitte Hendrikx and Joan Seiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A98XOZ-hbMw

Musicvideo for Rio


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSJFCW5eXHI