The Housing Question: An Odyssey

Jürgen Buchinger
Soft Opening: 7th May

‘The Housing Question: An Odyssey’
Jürgen Buchinger
Installation with large-format projection and 3-channel HD video, 14 min., 18 min., 463 min. and 12 min, dimensions variable

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.

• Please wear your mask FFP2 and keep the 2 meters distance from the visitors
• Max. of 2 people at once.