Places of Interest/Sehenswürdigkeiten
is a con­tin­u­ing pro­ject based around the im­por­tance we at­tach to ac­tual places. It is also a pro­ject based around our pre­con­cep­tions about places we have never been to and what we might ex­pect to find there.

Start­ing with an ini­tial list of peo­ple I know, have worked with or whose work I like, work­ing in the fields of Per­for­mance, Art or Mu­sic; I wrote to peo­ple around the world, ask­ing them to do the fol­low­ing 3 things for me:
– to choose a place that has a spe­cial mean­ing to them. This could be for very per­sonal rea­sons, or be­cause of po­lit­i­cal or his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance.
– search on­line and find a pho­to­graph of that place, taken by some­body else.
– record a de­scrip­tion of the pho­to­graph. The de­scrip­tion should in­clude the name of the coun­try it is in, but not the name of the place or the rea­son it was cho­sen. In short, an im­par­tial de­scrip­tion of the pho­to­graph with­out opin­ion.

I then sent the recorded de­scrip­tion to a vi­sual artist liv­ing in a dif­fer­ent coun­try who re­ceivd a fee as a com­mis­sion to paint a pic­ture en­tirely based on the recorded de­scrip­tion.
The artist did not know the sig­nif­i­cance of the place and only knew that they are paint­ing for ex­am­ple some­where in Ar­gentina or north­ern In­dia.

At pre­sent, the pro­ject con­nects (amongst other places) Shep­herds Bush, Beirut, Madrid, New­port Wales, Min­neapo­lis, NYC, Ker­ala, In­dia, Fin­land, Chile, Mozam­bique, Thai­land, War­saw and in­cludes con­tri­bu­tions from;
Nada Gam­bier, Vic Go­dard, Marta Gór­nicka, Char­bel Haber, Ant Hamp­ton, Maria Jerez, Eisa Joc­son, Pichet Klunchun , Ste­fan Kaegi,  Amir Reza Koohes­tani, Aaron Lands­man, Jon Lang­ford, Bouchra Ouizguen, Sankar Venkateswaran, Gisèle Vi­enne, Moulay Youssef Elka­h­fai, Alf Hof­stet­ter, Kristina Hor­vat Blaži­nović, Anne Kamin­sky, Bill Kennedy, Dustin Metz, Shadi Noy­ani, Noyau, George Rush, Naoko Tsu­ru­dome, Sabine Wewer, Capri­cho Casas , Karolina Dryps , Wal­ter Zand and oth­ers.

Places Of Interest opened at the
The­ater­spek­takel Fes­ti­val, Zurich on Au­gust 20th 2016  in­cluded a se­ries of short per­for­mances linked to the pro­ject and the ma­te­r­ial it gen­er­ated. It was also shown at the Cen­tre Cul­turel Su­isse in Paris. https://www.thefirstcut.ch/en/projects/places-of-interest/