Exposition

Foot Baths for All (2025)

Julia Weber, Mayumi Arai

About this exposition

The artistic intervention "Foot Baths for All" (2024) emerged from an ethnographic exploration of collective forms of life on wastelands in Switzerland. Ethnographic insights regarding self-organized care, occupation, informal infrastructure, gift economies, and the shared use of water and electricity were fictionalized and recontextualized in the inner city of Zurich, in order to explore new forms of appropriation and participation in urban life. This exposition aims to share the results and experiences of this research through multiple formats: a video documentation, a how-to guide, and a text that offers insights into the ethnographic research and its translation into an artistic intervention, conceptualizing "Foot Bath Urbanism" as an artistic method for city-making from below. This project is situated in the field of artistic urban research. It is based on an expanded notion of art that moves beyond institutional contexts to intervene directly in public urban spaces through installations and performative practices, following approaches such as “New Genre Public Art”. The how-to guide is connected to instruction-based art, challenging conventional notions of authorship while emphasizing accessibility, participation, and interactivity, rooted in the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Fluxus movement.
typeresearch exposition
keywordspublic art, urbanism, ethnography, intervention, artistic research
date15/09/2025
published06/12/2025
last modified06/12/2025
statuspublished
affiliationZurich University of the Arts
copyrightJulia Weber & Mayumi Arai
licenseAll rights reserved
languageEnglish
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3866465/3996774
doihttps://doi.org/10.22501/rc.3866465
published inResearch Catalogue
external linkhttps://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/221246


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