In a village of former East Germany, young adults meet with the intention of finding an alternative to isolation and social precariousness while their parents demonstrate in front of the disused factory, as every day of the year for the last 15 years. The young persons decide to organize a party; it is meant to help them to confront themselves on their divergent opinions as for the model of society to which they aspire. As antidote to exclusion, they choose the debate of ideas. The arrival of a foreign journalist reporting on the region sets off contrasting attitudes: for the oldest, it represents an answer to the wait of a recognition, whereas the younger ones see in it the necessity of freeing themselves from media standardization in order to construct networks of resistance on a local level.

Lenin spent 1914–17 living in exile in Zurich. Before he returned to Russia to play his part in the Revolution, he wrote a letter to the Swiss workers. In it he exhorted them to resist the ‘imperialist war’ and lauded the “proletarian revolution that is beginning in Europe“. Lenin’s social vision has not stood the test of time; nevertheless some of his arguments have taken on a new relevance in the context of recent political events on the world stage. This is where the artists Moser/Schwinger come into the picture.

WHAT KIND OF A SOCIETY DO WE REALLY WANT? Responding to Vladimir Lenin’s letter, Moser/Schwinger have realised a video work for the Kunsthaus Zürich, entitled ‘Alles wird wieder gut’ [‘It’ll all turn out alright’], in which they re-address the question of social utopias. What kind of a society would we wish for ourselves? And what social forms are we capable of sustaining? The artists spent a week, not far from Berlin, making a twenty-minute video. The plot revolves around a village community in the East of the reunited Germany, sixteen years after the Berlin Wall came down. Since 1989 unemployed workers have been demonstrating daily outside the gates of their old factory, protesting at the loss of their long-gone jobs. While a group of students in the adjacent village pub discuss their own future and that of their fellow citizens, children are putting on a show in the village church. A boy, playing the part of the young Lenin, cites passages from his farewell letter to the Swiss workers.

REPRESENTING THE PRESENT IN FILMS AND VIDEOS. As in their work ‘Capitulation Project’ – an attempt to understand, in the year 2003, the My Lai massacre perpetrated during the Vietnam War – Moser/Schwinger have again taken a historical process or event as their starting point and examine the representation of victims and perpetrators. They leave viewers with the knowledge that any search for historical truth is doomed to failure. In the work specially made for the Kunsthaus Zürich, they deliberately make a play on the ambiguity of the term ‘farewell letter’, which might be bidding farewell in the usual sense, but could equally well be a letter of dismissal – all too familiar in these times of business closures and reorganisation. As in the work ‘Unexpected Rules’ (2004), with which Moser/Schwinger represented Switzerland at the São Paulo Biennial, once again they are engaging with the issues surrounding representation and communication in the media today. Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger were both employed in the theatre at an earlier stage in their careers, and their art is a mixture of drama, video and installation. In their works they set up a complex interplay of apparent authenticity and subtle deception, which captivates the viewer with its formal precision and emotional intensity.

STOCK EXCHANGE ARCHITECTURE AND THE ZURICH CONCRETISTS. In their Kunsthaus exhibition, Moser/Schwinger focus not only on the question of social utopias but also on artistic-aesthetic utopias. In a seventeen-metre wall painting, they deliberately invoke memories of the Zurich Concretists; at the same time they take the notion of Concrete Art ad absurdum. The forms used here do not arise from strict parameters devised by the artists – experimental forms and colours with no connection to the real world – for they derive from economic factors, specifically the performance graphs of Swiss Market Index at the Zürcher Börse Swiss Exchange in 2005. ( Review by Mirjam Varadinis)