Skip to Content

Nick Tobier: Marvelous Guests

November 12, 2009
Laundro lg
The clothes dryer is turning. Slowly, the contents rotate 360 degrees clockwise. And then again. For ten minutes, or until another coin is inserted. Such is the elegant monotony of a laundromat, as each machine perfects its movements over set intervals. Next to the wall of dryers, a ballet dancer performs a stretching sequence. Extending an ankle and rotating the foot. First clockwise, 360 degrees, over and over. Then again. 

Nick Tobier, in collaboration with Juliane Stiegele, have been chosen as one of 10 teams to participate in EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS, taking place in Linz, Paris, Berlin and Copenhagen.

Their collaboration, Marvelous Guests, lends new working conditions and meanings to several trades by inviting these professionals to conduct their business in unusual locations — as a guest. These include a ballerina in a Laundromat, a stock trader in a funiculaire, a shepard and his flock on a football field. The expectation is that each encounter will produce its own unusual forms of communication on location. A large format catalogue of the projects appears in December, 2009, published in Linz, Austria by DIE FABRIKANTEN.

Marvelous Guests, as part of Exchange Radical Moments, interweaves diverse ​“organisms” of art- that interfere and interlock with many different communities, contexts and social spaces. On a single day in 2010, the simultaneous actions, images and interventions will sparkle and ignite like flares across the European landscape, leaving their ephemeral but direct and uncensored residue and fresh impressions lingering behind. These flashes of consciousness and spontaneous formations of large groupings of people will all contribute to a sense of a ​“Momentary Europe,” which positions itself at the forefront of innovative, dialogical processes.

Posted November 12, 2009 in Faculty