Events - Part 43

 Body and Freedom Festival
Zürich 2018

The Body and Freedom Festival was held from August 23-25, 2018 on the Rathausbrücke in Zürich, Switzerland.  The Rathausbrücke is a pedestrian bridge over the Limmat River that is so wide, it forms a public plaza.

The festival was the idea of Thomas Zollinger, the gray-haired third naked man from the right in the photo above, as a series of nude performance art pieces.  Many artists from all over Europe were invited to participate.

The performance piece above was called Nacktpassagen, or naked passages, in which the naked artists stood in a line across the plaza, so people crossing the plaza had to walk between them.

Here's a short video of people walking through the line of naked artists.

Russian artist Mischa Badasyan (with the beard, above) performed a piece called Blow Blew Blown in which he blew at a fellow naked artist.

Here's a video of this blow job.  I don't know if Badasyan was aware of the connotations of his work's title in English.

Here's artist Mischa Badasyan again, grabbing and manipulating his ample stomach.

And here's a video of his stomach exercises.

Swiss artist Elias Kirche made soap bubbles.

His performance included two other artists, Juli and Sunshine, who circled around him as he made bubbles.

Yann Marussich is a Swiss performance artist.  His piece, called Blanc Nu (white nude), invited passers-by to use his body like a whiteboard and answer the question, "How would you like to make love?"

Matthias Mollner is an Austrian artist.  Together with Claudia Wagner, they did a performance piece involving her dragging him around by a collar around his neck.

Their performance was called Fiffi (Fundamental Impotence Follows Fucking Ignorants), described as the body being pulled like an inconvenient object, an appendix which apparently is obliged to follow.

Benjamin Sebastian is an Australian/British artist.  His elaborate naked performance involved attaching ropes to himself and wrapping and unwrapping tape around his head.  This video shows the very end of the performance in which he wags his penis up and down for the audience.

Here's a better view of him.  He describes his work as involving "chaos magic, eroticism, ritual and gender fuckery."

Manuel Vason is a British artist interested in the role of the professional photographer in our image-driven society.

As this video shows, he roamed around the plaza as a "blind" photographer (though I suspect he could see through the cloth).

I must say I'm not a big fan of performance art, but naked performance art does have its appeal.