Parcours: An itinerary through Basel’s Old Town

Expanding Art Basel’s reach through the city’s old town with a temporary display of public art, Parcours invites artists and visitors to engage with Basel’s 1000-year-old urban and architectonic heritage. Organized for the sixth time by Basel-born curator Samuel Leuenberger, the 2022 edition gathers together 20 projects. Many of these interrogate notions of displacement and attachment and the transmission of knowledge and memory, where the local and global converge. Follow this guide for an itinerary through some highlights.

Leaving Messeplatz and the busy halls of the fair, head toward Wettsteinbrücke, the second oldest bridge in Basel. At its foot, what could be mistaken for a cluster of driftwood is actually Polish artist Maria Loboda’s site-specific installation The Year of Living Dangerously (2022) – created especially for Parcours. The work expemplifies Loboda continuous exploration of the signs and hidden meanings of Western culture. In this instance, her speculative archeology takes the shape of accumulated flotsam – dotted with reproductions of famous outdoor sculptures by the likes of Constantin Brancusi, Joan Miró, and Jean Arp. Like the debris surrounding them, the copies show signs of decay, as if they had remained in the water for a long time. Beyond its suggestion of global threats of flooding, Loboda's installation also makes a tongue-in-cheek comment on the art historical canon’s enduring bias toward male and Western aesthetics.

From here, walk a few hundred meters down the street to the Kunstmuseum. For Parcours, the institution hosts Palestinian artist Jumana Manna's video installation Wild Relatives. In this contemplative, hour-long piece from 2018, Manna follows the itinerary of some seeds from a storage vault in the Norwegian Arctic to an agricultural research facility in Lebanon, where scientists attempt to recover a gene bank from the city of Aleppo that was lost during the Syrian revolution. In this remarkable film, the destiny of the plants intersects with that of refugees working in the fields. As two modalities of displacement and survival converge, urgent questions are raised about our attachment and relationship to the land.

A stone’s throw away, British artist Jeremy Deller presents a selection of films from 2012 – 2020 at kult.kino, the movie theater located underneath Jean Tinguely’s fountains, next to the Kunsthalle. The films are complemented by a parallel poster campaign in the vitrines of Theater Basel on the adjacent street. A keen observer of society and popular culture, Deller has produced a number of video works over the years, exploring notable moments in recent history and characters at the margins of the mainstream. Among the films on display, Everybody in The Place, An Incomplete History of Britain 1984–1992 (2019) delves into the emergence of acid house in the turbulent context of 1980s Britain. Another piece by Deller portrays British history as it was being made: with the title referring to the Russian president’s alleged interference in the Brexit referendum, Putin’s Happy (2019), was filmed in Westminster during the months leading up to March 29, 2019 (what should initially have been Brexit Day). The work documents the heated protests on all political sides and provides an insight into a divided society.

Leaving kult.kino, take the underpass running beneath Tinguely’s fountains. Emerging on the other side of the road, you will arrive at the Neptune fountain, at the rear of Barfüsserkirche, home to the city’s Historical Museum. Here, you will discover Tabula Rasa (2021/2022), an outdoor installation by Mexican artist Bosco Sodi consisting of 365 spheres of raw clay scattered all around the monument. Each ball was created with school children from the region and contains locally-sourced seeds from maize, squash, and beans. These foods not only complement each other nutritionally – in indigenous Meso- and North-American agriculture, they are planted together as companion plants, facilitating the growing process and increasing yield. On the final day of Art Basel week, passersby will be invited to collect the seed balls and plant them in their garden. With this installation, Sodi draws attention to natural cycles and their reliance on multispecies cooperation. More particularly, he articulates symbiosis as the foundation of a healthy and balanced mode of existence among humans as well as with nature.

From there, a 20-minute walk will lead you back to the fair’s main site on Messeplatz, or you can choose to keep going and discover more of the projects in this year’s Parcours sector.

Discover all Parcours projects here, and find out more about Parcours Night, unfolding on Saturday, June 18 across Basel here.

Maria Loboda's project is presented by Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin; Wschód, Warsaw; and Maisterravalbuena, Madrid.

Jumana Manna's project is presented by Hollybush Gardens, London.

Jeremy Deller's projects are presented by Art : Concept, Paris; and The Modern Institute, Glasgow.

Bosco Sodi's project is presented by König Galerie, Berlin, London, Seoul, and Vienna; and Kasmin, New York City.

Simon W Marin is a curator and writer based in Zurich, Switzerland..