Julia Weber

Switzerland (residence)
en

Dr. Julia Weber is an arts-based urban researcher and social scientist. She is currently working as a research associate in the collaborative project "Public Data Lab" at University of the Arts in Zurich. She is also responsible for participation & collaboration at the Kalkbreite building and housing cooperative in Zurich. She has an MA in Sociology, Psychology and Philosophy (Universities of Bern and Zurich) and in Fine Arts (Zurich University of the Arts). 

In 2024-25, she led the SNSF project "Urban Wastelands as Ambiguous Spaces for Appropriation and Participation" at the Institute for Contemporary Art Research (ZHdK). From 2017-2020 she was a researcher in the SNSF project "Fragmented City" (Institute for Contemporary Art Research, ZHdK). In her dissertation "Loitering?! Potentials of an Urban Form of Living", she examined how situations of participatory knowledge production can be produced through social-artistic interventions (PhD cooperation ZHdK & Art University Linz). For her PhD she received the Award of Excellence 2022 of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research. At the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland and the ZHdK she was involved in developmental research in art education (2011-2017). At the University of Basel she conducted research on photography, gender, body (2009-2011). 

research

research expositions

  • Foot Baths for All (2025) author(s): Julia Weber, Mayumi Arai published in: Research Catalogue
    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.
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