Lecturer: Thea Reifler and Phila Bergmann

Bringing Institutions to LIVE: Curating Live Arts and Creating Infrastructures

During our time as directors at Shedhalle Zürich (2020–2025), we developed a curatorial approach to process-based exhibition-making called the ProtoZone. This format served as a testing ground for exploring a score-based curatorial methodology. Within that we worked with live performance, transdisciplinary gatherings, and durational formats as means of engaging publics while actively questioning the infrastructures that shape these encounters. This course shares our experiences of curating, producing, and reflecting on live artistic formats in the visual art context. The course deals with questions like: What are the potentials and constraints of ephemeral art forms within institutional frameworks? How can the act of curating live arts become itself a critical mode of instituting?

Participants will take away concrete tools and methodologies for working with ephemeral practices as curators, mediators, communicators or facilitators. Beyond artistic content, the course addresses the conditions of production and collaboration—including hosting processes, public relations, outreach, and education.

The course invites participants to reimagine the institution in its ambivalence as an overarching entity and ongoing collective process, and to ground this imagination in social justice, multiplicity, and critical reflection. The curriculum will evolve in dialogue with the participants’ own practices and interests.

Thea Reifler and Phila Bergmann work as curators, directors, dramaturgues, lecturers, mentors and social justice trainers. From 2020 until 2025 they worked as Directors of Shedhalle Zurich. 

International teaching assignments, guest professorships, workshops, and lectures have taken them to institutions including the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the University of Giessen, the Summer Academy of Fine Arts Salzburg, HGB Leipzig, ZHdK, Sandberg Academy Amsterdam, and documenta fifteen. They presented artistic projects at numerous international institutions and festivals, including Berliner Festspiele – MaerzMusik, 3hd Festival Berlin, Nowy Theatre in Warsaw, European Center for the Arts Hellerau, Sophiensaele Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, and Zürcher Theater Spektakel.

Thea Reifler and Phila Bergmann worked as Lecturers at the department of Art and Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Currently, Thea Reifler works at ZHdK, HSLU and with DIVAS, a web for embodied and touch-based practices in Zurich among others. 

Phila Bergmann works as a lecturer at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU) where they teach at the Bachelor’s program Art & Mediation as well as in the Master of Fine Arts. Phila Bergmann is a PhD candidate at the PhD in Practice in Curating program at the University of Reading (UK). From 2019 until 2023 Phila Bergmann was part of the Swiss National Science Foundation project, “Collecting the ephemeral. Prerequisites and possibilities for making performance art last” at HSLU. 

Image: Impression of ProtoZone8 at Shedhalle Zürich. Picture by Carla Schleiffer.