The Housing Question: An Odyssey
Exhibition Details:
The Housing Question: An Odyssey is a documentary video installation about urban living, the right to housing, and the urban housing market. The project deals with the privatization of our cities and the resulting gentrification processes, which more and more divide cities along monetary fault lines and class differences. Viewers go on a journey with the artist, starting from a house in Basel whose tenants had to move out to make room for redevelopment, to discover the financial entanglements of the owners behind the house that lead to a refugee camp in Burkina Faso where Doctors without Borders is helping internally displaced persons. The work encourages viewers to think about their own living situation and introduces tools for research and resistance to affected persons. It does not only reflect on the concrete hardships of our current housing market, but on the philosophical question of what dwelling is for us today and how we can think anew our relationship to the spaces we inhabit.
Jürgen Buchinger is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Basel and Lucerne. In his practice, he often deals with social and political topics and uses a range of media from video installations to social interactions and collaborative work. In a content-driven approach, instead of giving answers, his aim is to find poetic forms for overcomplex but important topics. At the moment he works on the artistic research project “Making Public Space” on the transformation of urban spaces through moving image interventions at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Featuring:
I am an artist and researcher in the field of media art and sound with a special interest in public space and interactive and participatory art. My research-based approach emphasizes experimentation, and aims to include nature and non-human entities. I utilize artistic artifacts as vehicles to convey knowledge, using the poetic application of data as an emotional trigger to explore the complexities of our world. Through art I explore the connections of a certain medium or technology with a subject matter in search of new forms of aesthetic expression and the communication of knowledge outside of discursive language. I believe that our current technological and artistic advancements permit us to expand artmaking to a collaborative practice that includes non-human others and nature—thus subsuming the eco-system of our planet itself into the art process. For to deal with our current global predicament, we must find ways to transcend the techno-scientific divide that we have built up by insisting on our own human exceptionalism and built new entanglements with all that surrounds us. My works have been exhibited in national and international exhibitions. I hold a Master's degree in Film from Lucerne Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and an artistic PhD from University of Art Linz (more here). I am teaching at the Lucerne School of Design, Film and Art the Kunstschule Liechtenstein.