THE RESIDENCIES

RESIDENCE DECEMBER 2025
Presentations: 16.12 – 18.12.2025

Zainab J Lascandri
supported by Fatima Moumouni, Tracy September & Brandy Butler

Zainab J Lascandri is a performer, musician, and trans/interdisciplinary artist. Her practice moves between popular culture and contemporary art, between collective processes and personal expression. In her work, she blurs categories, deconstructs attributions, and creates spaces beyond established norms.

Project description
"Imagine A Black Child"
(Text by Zainab J Lascandri)

For OPEN STUDIO, she brings IMAGINE A BLACK CHILD as source material—a polyphonic archive of her own text work, recorded sounds, and produced sounds. It condenses diasporic experiences in the Swiss context: from childhood in the 1980s and 90s to coming of age in the 2000s to motherhood and aging in the present.

Accompanied by Fatima Moumouni, Tracy September, and Brandy Butler, she will rework fragments, scenes, and moods and transform them into a sonic-scenic form. At the center: invisibility—as a social experience, as an aesthetic strategy, as the frequency of what remains unsaid. What is the texture of secrecy? What future does the echo carry? Between sound studies, speculative fiction, and subversive humor, she explores how pleasure and joy unfold hope as spaces of resonance.

RESIDENCE JANUARY 2026
Presentations: 29.01 – 31.01.2026

RRRRRR Collective
Keng Chen, Wen-Chi Liu, Eneas Nikolai Prawdzic, Dino Radoncic,
Nathalie Stirnimann, and Stefan Stojanovic

The transdisciplinary RRRRRR Collective was founded in Hong Kong in 2018 by Keng Chen, Wen-Chi Liu, Dino Radoncic, Eneas Prawdzic, Nathalie Stirnimann, and Stefan Stojanovic. The name "RRRRRR" plays on a linguistic pun. The letter "R" is difficult to pronounce in many languages. It symbolizes the willingness to bridge cultural and linguistic divides, even if mutual understanding remains incomplete, simply by pronouncing something differently.
The collective often uses language, wordplay, and dry humor as a starting point for artistic thinking, which is often reflected in the titles of their works. The starting point for their work is always the search for artistic ways to stay connected across continents, borders, and cultural differences.

Project description
"Wen Keng We Meet? – On Connection"
(Text by RRRRRR Collective)

Despite globalization, we are experiencing a return of borders, divisions, and geopolitical tensions. How can we stay connected amid these developments? The translocal RRRRRR Collective addresses this question in its latest work, Wen Keng We Meet? – On Connection.

To this end, Shanghai-based performer Keng Chen and Taipei-based artist Wen-Chi Liu set out to get as close to each other as possible. Together with the Zurich members of the collective, they travel to the narrowest point of the strait: Keng to Xiamen, Wen-Chi to Kinmen. Six kilometers lie between them. They stand facing each other – and yet they cannot see each other.

Balloons rise, phones ring, boats are rented, fireworks are set off. Nevertheless, the view remains blurred, the distance palpable. At the end of the day, all that remains is the screen: a Zoom meeting in which the situation is renegotiated.
As part of OPEN STUDIO, this attempt to create closeness despite separation is transformed into a performative resonant space. Three separate sound spaces reflect the geographical and political realities of the collective—Taiwan, China, and Europe as acoustically isolated yet resonating spaces of experience. The result is an audio-visual performance between documentary theater and fictional search: a poetic glimpse of a fragmented yet inevitably connected world.

Keng: – "Can you see me?"

Wen-Chi: – "Where are you?"

RESIDENCE FEBRUARY 2026
Presentations: 26.02 – 28.02.2026

Anna Papst / Vincent Glanzmann

Anna Papst is an author, director, and dramaturge. Her work ranges from documentary storytelling to scenic condensation—often exploring places where memories, voices, and ruptures seek new forms. With her format Reportage fürs Theater (Reportage for the Stage), she brought interviews and personal stories to life as poetically condensed stage works. In projects with Mats Staub or Dimitri de Perrot – including NIEMANDSLAND, UNTER UNS, INTIME REVOLUTION – she works with formats that rely entirely on the audience's sense of hearing. www.annapapst.ch

Vincent Glanzmann is a drummer, sound designer, and creative director. The internationally active artist was born in Tokyo, Japan, and currently lives in Zurich, Switzerland. After studying jazz at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, he has worked internationally in the fields of music, theater, dance, and design. In 2017, he received a Jazz/Pop/Rock Work Year grant from the City of Zurich, and since 2023, he has been a scholarship holder of the Arvore Foundation. His practice combines percussion and electronics, improvisation and composition. He often focuses on sounds that are otherwise overlooked and rhythms that reveal repressed stories – spaces that can be experienced through resonance in sound and body. www.vincentglanzmann.com

Project description
"unerhört ungestört (AT)"
(Text by Papst / Glanzmann)

In the discrimination against women, there is a millennia-old practice of labeling women as crazy and thereby denying them credibility. Unwelcome voices that report on sexism, domestic violence, or sexual assault, for example, are trivialized or silenced altogether in this way.

Freely adapted from Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," in which the author calls for every woman to have her own (lockable) room for self-development, Anna Papst, in collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Vincent Glanzmann, creates in her first collection of poetry the fiction of a house in which every woman has a room where her voice can be heard and her experiences become part of a collective narrative.

Using the sound recording and playback technology borrowed from Dimitri de Perrot's project "Niemandsland," Anna Papst and Vincent Glanzmann offer each visitor an acoustic tour of this house and an encounter with the women who inhabit it. Text and sound create a porous scene between inner life and the outside world.

RESIDENCE MARCH 2026
Presentations: 26.03 – 28.03.2026

Fazil On Yu

Fazil On Yu (Onyu Fazil Bin Damusanga) is a choreographer, performer, and sound artist with roots in Uganda who lives in Winterthur. His work moves between theater, sound art, and activism—at the intersection of political engagement, social reflection, and sensory spatial experience. Growing up in a small village in Uganda, shaped by oral and communal storytelling traditions, he brings a perspective that enters into dialogue with his new environment in Europe.
His works deal with questions of belonging, loss, and identity, combining personal experiences with social engagement. He understands theater as a space for intervention, empowerment, and collective memory. His works have been shown internationally, including at the Uganda National Theater, various African art festivals, and performance platforms in Zurich and Europe. In 2022, he received the prestigious Prince Claus Award in Amsterdam and in 2021 the Movimentale Dance Arts Festival Award in Naples, Italy.
www.fazilonyu.com

Project description
"Until They Hear Black Voices"
(Text by Fazil On Yu)

At the heart of Fazil On Yu's work is hearing: experiences of exclusion, invisibility, and the search for orientation in a space that often offers him no echo. With Until They Hear Black Voices, he develops a sound-narrative performance that makes the voices and stories of Black people in Switzerland and Europe audible—a narrative of complex struggles, loss, and identity.

The starting point is audio recordings, interviews, poems, and his own music, which he collected and produced in Zurich. In OPEN STUDIO, they are woven together into a resonance chamber: fragments that not only document, but also seek a new form of storytelling—between installation and performance, between sound and body.

Inspired by the nightly fire gatherings in his home village, where people told stories, listened, and reminisced, Fazil transfers this circular practice to the urban space. He combines African storytelling tradition with soundscapes of everyday life here, thus creating a poetic approach to a language of the in-between – where origin and present, personal memory and collective experience flow into one another. OPEN STUDIO with Fazil On Yu thus becomes a place where silence is broken and voices that would otherwise remain unheard become audible—a sonic space of encounter, fragility, and resonance.

Artists
Zainab J Lascandri, supported by Fatima Moumouni, Tracy September & Brandy Butler
RRRRRR Collective: Keng Chen, Wen-Chi Liu, Eneas Nikolai Prawdzic, Dino Radoncic,
Nathalie Stirnimann, Stefan Stojanovic
Anna Papst / Vincent Glanzmann
Fazil On Yu

Documentation
Text documentation: Smilla Diener, Salomé Voegelin
Video documentation: Jessie Fischer

Studio DdP Team
Concept, artistic direction and production: Dimitri de Perrot
Sound engineering: Max Molling
Lighting design: Karl Egli / groups
Set construction: Leo Hoffmann
Stage: Lea Meierhofer
Technical direction: Raphaël Vuilleumier
Communication and think tank: Christoph Meier

Gessnerallee Team
Production management: Anja Mayer
Diversity agent and artistic advisor: Manuel Gerst

Production
Studio DdP Association

Co-production
Theaterhaus Gessnerallee Zürich

With the support of
City of Zurich, Cultural Affairs Office of the Canton of Zurich, Landis & Gyr Foundation, Hans F. Tellenbach Foundation.

The project ‘Imagine A Black Child’ by Zainab J Lascandri is also supported by Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council. 

The project ‘Wen Keng We Meet? – On Connection’ by the RRRRRR Collective is also supported by Pro Helvetia, Sinokultur, Albert Huber-Stiftung and Ernst und Olga Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung.

Die im Projekt «unerhört ungestört» zu hörende Texte entstanden im Rahmen des Freiraumbeitrags der Fachstelle Kultur Kanton Zürich an Anna Papst.

Dimitri de Perrot / Studio DdP is supported by the City and Canton of Zurich with a concept grant / multi-year group grant for 2024-2027. He is ‘Artist in Residence’ at Le Centquatre – Paris.

OPEN STUDIO uses elements from the stage play NIEMANDSLAND by Dimitri de Perrot; the corresponding credits can be found here.