On 15 May, only 365 days remained until the opening of the Swiss National Exhibition in the Three-Lakes Region. To mark the occasion, Nelly Wenger, President of the Executive Board, gave a personal presentation on the meaning of the project on the Expo.02 website. She spoke of how the project is a unifying force, how the Swiss people will identify with it and perhaps even reinvent themselves.
An appeal
In a year's time, Expo.02 will open the doors of its five Arteplages. I would now like to invite the public - all the people of Switzerland - to an event that is essential for everyone, for Switzerland and for Switzerland's links with the world. As a celebration, it will provide an opportunity for a fundamental debate on the Switzerland of the future.
The appeal I am making today will be repeated before Expo.02 begins: to speak out on specific occasions to express what I foresee about the event as it prepares. This first text available on the Net inaugurates a sort of soap opera, the episodes of which will be staggered over the year that remains before the start of the event.
The need for truth
Expo.02 presents itself to me as a singular experience in terms of the paradox it creates. During the initial phases of planning and preparation, transparency was essential. But communicating the news - good or bad - was not enough to reassure us about the credibility of the project. Despite this constraint, I would like to express some of the truths and certainties of our project.
Opening
The national exhibition of the third millennium will open on 15 May 2002 in the Three-Lakes Region. It will take place. I'm betting on its success, even if its perfection and shortcomings are not yet a foregone conclusion.
Money
My time at Expo.02 was largely taken up with getting the project back on track and money matters. And even today I'm told, in a contradictory way, that we've talked enough about money and organisation, but that we still need to talk about it. At Expo, we know what money is: we fight again and again to find the money. Every day, our country proclaims its economic success and wealth. And this is the same country that wants to know every last cent of what it could lose in a national project. I am committed to using the money entrusted to us by the private sector and public authorities as wisely as possible.
Genealogy and identity of the project
The history of Expo.02, which grew out of Expo.01, would be too long to write here. But there is one essential element that guides most of our decisions. On several occasions, the directors of the project were tempted, under pressure to make savings, to return to a classic national exhibition on a single site, as had been done in Zurich (1883 and 1939), Geneva (1896) and Lausanne (1964). Such a project would have been less costly, would have required less preparation time and would have been more realistic for Switzerland. But, against all odds, I dare say that we resisted the temptation to regress to a more traditional exhibition.
Why did you adopt such a difficult, costly and daring position? We were driven by what I call the hidden force of the project, in other words an inner necessity buried in the project itself. It was as if this project, however uncertain and deconstructed, contained a breath that could create something new. Sometimes I tell myself the following fable: one day, who knows why, a new wind blew through the Three Lakes region. Our predecessors at Expo.01 sensed this new wind and drew us into their dream. But their dream was too far removed from the Swiss imagination. Back on land, on the shores, we, their heirs, persisted in hearing the creative breath, but we tried to make it accessible, by measuring the Swiss possible. In this way, Expo.02's mission is not to rectify, moralise and reduce a dream that is too immense. Our identity is defined by an original impetus, a new project.
If we have refused to take a step backwards, if we have made a legacy of creation, it is because we are taking a risk: the risk of an innovative event, which may seem “heretical and dissident”. At a time when I am serenely affirming the certainty of openness, I am betting on a heretical exhibition, provided that heresy is creative, and on a dissident exhibition, if dissidence proves to be a promise for the future.
The emergence of meaning
The history of national exhibitions began in Zurich in 1883. A tradition was established: the periodic organisation of an event aimed at strengthening national cohesion. The impetus came from the cities (Geneva, Bern, Zurich and Lausanne), which came up with the idea for an exhibition. The Confederation seized the opportunity to deliver a patriotic message. Expo.02 came from a region comprising several cities and cantons, and had no official message to convey. The Federal Council gave the Expo Management a mandate to organise a national exhibition, but it did not accompany this with a message of identity. For the first time, the Confederation chose to present itself through four exhibition projects integrated into the Arteplages.
This absence of a message was often transformed into a criticism of Expo.02 itself. This led to the suspicion that the exhibition had no purpose, that it was a kind of luxurious cultural toy for the elite.
But as I say today, the absence of a message was, on the contrary, an opportunity because we didn't have to illustrate a pre-established programme. We were offered a space for invention, and that's in keeping with our times, when we don't want to literally reproduce directives from above. Who today would believe that an ephemeral event is enough to define a collective identity? This observation, experienced day by day in the practice of the project, promises extraordinary freedom and establishes an unexpected modernity.
The construction of meaning
In today's society, mega-events are on the increase. The pretexts of commemoration and celebration go hand in hand with the expectations of a leisure society. Many of these major events no longer take the trouble to spell out their meaning. Expo.02 could have followed this trend: it could have been an entertaining cultural event that never had to say what it was all about. In contrast to this trend, I never stopped looking for the deeper meaning of Expo.02. I didn't find it like a treasure just waiting to be discovered. Expo.02, as it prepares, generates its meaning. The Expo is now a constellation of real, true and present elements: the exhibition projects, the list of events, the many teams working, the architects and their projects, the practical organisation of the event, the activity of the directors, and so on. Expo.02 contained all this information even before it opened. The Expo existed long before 15 May 2002.
All these elements are obviously organised for the realisation of Expo.02. They are not brought together in an object that would automatically give the meaning of the Expo. For the meaning of Expo.02 - and this is for me the great lesson of my practice - is to be constructed. It's a question of linking all the events together and adopting a networked reading of these elements, in other words, linking them according to their own characteristics and not according to a programme given in advance.
Expo.02 does not appear before my eyes as a unified object, an entity with a defined identity, a clear and precise form, with legible contours. Expo is a constellation of projects, events, concepts, desires, modes of operation, expectations and values. It is an elusive object, invisible as such because it has no fixed limits, no unambiguous existence: a scattering of elements that are difficult to bring together, a patchwork that is not a montage of diverse fabrics brought together in reassuring harmony. Expo - and this is its extreme originality - is a scattering of elements, a multitude of particles. Nothing is easily assembled; it is not a puzzle to be put together. Expo is therefore a fragmented object whose form and meaning have to be arranged, whose perimeter has to be worked out and whose direction has to be found. In the end, we will all see the "Expo object" emerge as the event unfolds, once Expo.02 is up and running.
I discovered in the Expo.02 project - and this puts it in tune with the times - that meaning has to be invented, created. That it doesn't exist, ready-made, hidden away somewhere in the project. That it is not a question of bringing it to light, but rather of bringing it into the world through an act of foundation. And that, ultimately, like a flickering flame, it is only a promise, a promise of meaning that can blossom and illuminate, while remaining fundamentally incomplete. So, on the basis of my practical experience of the Expo, I am seeking to establish the meaning of the event we are preparing.
Meaning of action
In the disorder of the project, in the randomness of its trajectory, we have discovered the meaning of action. We have been condemned to a sense of urgency in practice and to the need to dare to go all the way. The meaning of action can be understood in several ways.
In our country, it is not ideas or concepts that drive action. Switzerland bases its success and its way of acting on pragmatism. At Expo, we adopted a pragmatic attitude because it was the only way to deal with the hazards that constantly thwarted and called into question any order or decision. We were led to an attitude that is part sport, part tragedy: even if you don't know what to do, you still have to act, because action liberates, unravels and can resolve.
The Expo.02 actors did not have the profile required for this role. In fact, no one can claim similar experience. Talent for action does not correspond to a defined professional profile but depends much more on a personal profile. I now believe that this relative mismatch may well have saved the project; we had to invent a cross-disciplinary approach, testing the reversibility of roles and functions for a networked action that was constantly being redefined.
An expedition
Our good fortune lies in our random and risky approach... Expo.02 seems to me to be more of an expedition than a business. It is constructed in the image of an exploration on the high seas aimed at discovering or conquering distant lands. Generally speaking, an expedition is characterised as much by perfect organisation with a view to ultimate success and the riches it will bring, as by an intrepid and courageous adventure whose outcome is not known until it is over. The expedition expresses movement, invention and cunning, sometimes recklessness, but also tenacity and courage. It is subject to multiple dangers, some known and therefore ready to be overcome, others still unknown, which will arise where they are not expected.
Our work at Expo, like a ship on the water, does not progress in a linear fashion. All the components, from reflection to concrete realisation, interpenetrate and interact. A large number of parameters come into play at each stage of the project. Incidents, new data and unforeseen events cannot be eliminated. On the contrary, they are part of it, and they reveal how our society works. Expo.02 has the particularity of being an adventure in a country that is reluctant to let itself be taken into unfamiliar territory.
Expo is not so much a business that has to produce results and profits, as an expedition: a long-prepared but risky journey whose objective is to discover new territories, in other words, for us, the perception of different and multiple points of view on Switzerland and its people turned towards the world.
An unexpected model
In the midst of the apparent confusion - of the choice of people, of the management of contingencies, of the instability of our position - a model as old as Switzerland was put in place, as if against our will: a combination of concentrated management at the head of Expo and decentralised management of the Arteplages. What has become essential in our internal organisation is a federation of powers assigned to the General Management and the Management Committee, and a delegation of responsibilities to the heads of the Arteplages. Our project brings together several sites that can become autonomous, contrasting but complementary worlds. Characterised by its fragmentation into 4 sites, its dispersal and its lack of centrality, it reflects, like a rediscovered image, a Swiss model that we know well but which wants to express something new.
This model no longer offers itself to us as an old and worn-out formula, but as a laboratory for experimenting with chance and circumstance. At the head of a risky, new and, it seems to me, controlled expedition, I discovered, from the very heart of how we operate, the foundations of Switzerland's political and social structures. Faced with the need to deal with the unforeseen, the way in which Expo.02 was organised enabled us to bring together a Swiss model and a management model that made it possible to confront and resolve uncertainties. Expo.02, which had to act as a disaster, offered the opportunity to dream of Swiss efficiency and solidarity.
Our action took place in a multiple temporality, made up of, or rather broken down into, advances, delays, expectations, hazards and serendipity. The Expo.02 period was first and foremost an immediate and teeming present, full of twists and turns of all kinds and strongly influenced by the unforeseen. But after the period of disorder and chaos, we were struck by the uniqueness of this way of operating. We experimented with it and fine-tuned it to suit our requirements. We extracted this model from the fertile ground of Expo. Constant mobility, the ability to take risks and the speed with which decisions are made mean that contingencies can be mastered: Expo.02 is, from start to finish, riddled with uncertainty. But we now know how to deal with it and resolve it, not through principles but through action itself. Perhaps this project will provide an opportunity to develop new skills that we are not used to in Switzerland: the management of novelty and risk, skills that are becoming increasingly valuable in the world as it is.
For my part, at Expo.02 I live a philosophy of action that could be summed up as follows: when faced with uncertainty, ambiguity, disorder or stalemate, we must act and act together. If you like, it's a form of philosophy of the will. But to avoid blind voluntarism, it seems to me essential that action should have a project, the meaning of which can now be set out.
Meaning of the project
The public is familiar with the simple statement of the Expo.02 project: 4 Arteplages and 1 mobile Arteplage, 37 exhibitions, a multitude of shows. Expo.02 aims to be multiple, varied and diverse. But what, we are often asked, is the point of the event itself? Is it simply the biggest event you'll ever see in Switzerland? Is our ambition to be the most immense, the most fragmented, the most diverse, the most everything? And is our aim, as has been repeated ad infinitum, to be festive, playful, imaginative, designed to teach the all-too-reasonable Swiss to let themselves be carried away for once by the dream, the creative leisure of “Art-et-Plage”? Or do we simply want to entertain and amuse by offering an interesting interlude, for a summer, to Swiss people who are a little too serious?
To these legitimate demands, I would first reply that it would not be “bad enough” in Switzerland to pull off a major event simply by announcing the game, the dream and the emotion, a moment when you see yourself and your compatriots, a huge gathering that would be halfway between a well-mannered festival and a popular celebration. We know that this is lacking.
But it's not enough, and it wouldn't be worth spending so much energy and money against all odds if our project was just a big theme park. In my opinion, the profound meaning of Expo.02 is to allow each individual and everyone together to experience the world in an attempt to understand it in its fragmentation, in its parcelling out. Expo.02 offers a possible place for an experiment: to envisage a civilisation that requires a new way of thinking, living and acting for oneself and for the community. With this in mind, Expo.02 will be a world exhibition that will offer everyone the chance to experience their own era. As a national exhibition, Expo.02 aims to bring Switzerland into line with the times.
Going back in time
The question of time is at the heart of the project: it was the initial theme of Expo.01, and is particularly present today in the dialectic of the Murten-Morat Arteplage, entitled Instant and Eternity. At the instigation of the architect Jean Nouvel, this Arteplage in the very town of Murten offers different ways of experiencing time: time that passes, time that stands still, time that runs too fast. To this end, the architect and his team have planned to create a series of ephemeral situations on the site that are grafted onto the environment: huts, tents, containers, kiosks made of corrugated iron, as well as structures such as gravel heaps or piles of logs. These situations are inserted into the site, recomposing the space of the old town, that of the narrow strip of land forming the shoreline and the surrounding landscape. On the lake, like a lighthouse or an unknown vessel, stands the monolith that houses three panoramas that establish different times.
Setting the theme of time in the town of Murten offers a wealth of meanings. Murten presents itself as an idyllic picture postcard of Switzerland. This ancient town has been preserved, pampered and pampered, and is constantly being tidied up and cleaned up. It represents the ideal Swiss village, the perfect place to live, a well-preserved jewel case. Murten is nostalgia. It has the power to bring everything back to the past, to a time stuck in the past. In Murten, the old is as new, the passing of time does not alter the town, which remains intact, preserved from wear and tear, death and decay. Murten is eternal, and the clock above the town's gate tower has no hold on it. Murten, as a site, speaks directly of time, a time fossilised in an unchanging past. This time is the guarantee of Swiss values and images.
Jean Nouvel's project introduces a break in a perfect, controlled system of time. It also introduces a perversion by placing disruptive elements at the very heart of the city, elements that deviate from the system, that stand out. These elements add dissonance to the harmony. A tension is established between a past that lasts, because it has been preserved and conserved as historic monuments, sometimes for the use of tourists only, and a present that is lively, fragile and unstable, because Jean Nouvel's buildings will only last one summer.
The Arteplage Murten-Morat will interweave several perceptions: the time of inner perception (consciousness), the time of matter, the time of the world (media news). Between speed and slowing down, between present and past, between unfolding and duration, between intensity and dilation, between cyclical time and linear time, different temporalities are superimposed in our existence. The sensation of life is experienced through the interweaving of these diverse and jerky times.
Time in Murten-Morat is going to go out of control: it will no longer be just a moment frozen in the past, an eternal moment, but one that will be set in motion by the architectural interventions on the Arteplage. Murten-Morat, and with it the image of Switzerland, will see its time dismantled because it has been disrupted, turned upside down and turned upside down, but it will also see its time rewound, like a clock that recharges, that regains its energy to tick off the moments in a different rhythm.
Decentring
What does the fact that Expo.02 is taking place on several sites mean? Even if the Arteplages model reproduces the Swiss model of a country without a real centre but with a multitude of regional centres, by making it more efficient, it's not a question of re-establishing a miniature Switzerland. We are not reproducing Switzerland in all its cultural, linguistic and gastronomic diversity. What we have here is precisely the opposite: fragmentation, peripherality, eccentricity. In place of order, unity and coherence, Expo.02 opposes disordered, disparate and atomised elements that do not revolve around a centre. Each Arteplage becomes a point of attraction, the place to be for a particular event, a night-time event or a cantonal day out.
The Arteplage Mobile du Jura in itself reflects this lack of centrality. It symbolises the deliberately fragmented nature of the Expo. Built like a boat in constant motion, popping up unexpectedly, disappearing on the waters of the three lakes and threading its way through the canals, this Arteplage signifies a world in motion, but always in search of a rallying point. It will steer our adventure like an agitator and a draughtsman tracing the networked lines of the Expo.02 space: a moving space where the connections between dimensions and directions intersect and mutually parasitise each other.
The motto of this boat is inscribed on its pavilion: Meaning and Motion. The Arteplage, the Exhibition's emblem, is an invitation to travel, to drift. Expo.02 has built a boat that is stable but subject to the waves of all kinds of hazards. Travelling on the Arteplage Mobile du Jura will allow you to see Switzerland differently, from other points of view. The theme of Meaning and Motion is a call to mourn the loss of a fixed, unchanging Switzerland whose destiny is given once and for all. It expresses the spontaneity of a wandering desire in perpetual wandering and reference to the chosen direction. The Arteplage Mobile du Jura will be a fundamental forerunner of an attitude of being in the world and of being in Switzerland.
Seeing the landscape differently
Expo.02 is taking place in one part of Switzerland, a region made up of cities, lakes, plains and mountains. Unity of place, the rule for such events, has not been respected: the choice has been to scatter the sites, though they are linked by the same relationship to the water, the riverbanks and the city.
What does the architecture of Arteplages suggest? The architecture chosen is not there to further embellish the delightful Trois-Lacs region. On the contrary, it introduces a gap, creating an imaginary place made up of a landscape that is already there and an ephemeral construction. In this way, a new space is opened up to the visitor who, at the end of his or her visit, will make it his or her own and turn it into a territory appropriate to his or her time. The architecture of Arteplages highlights the landscape but does not embellish it. It imposes itself as an artifice that is superimposed on the landscape in an ephemeral manner. From the outset, Expo.02 opted for the ephemeral. This imperative of ephemerality has given rise to an architecture that breaks with the past, and this is an opportunity for our project. More than architecture, the Arteplages are constructed events, large structures erected for Expo.02, offering unusual views of Switzerland.
The Arteplage Neuchâtel pushes back the limits of the city on the water, inventing a peninsula that is both attached to the mainland and stretches out to sea. Following in the footsteps of the city's urban development, which over the centuries has spread from top to bottom, ever closer to the lake, the project builds on this call from the open sea. Here, the project is different. The parcel of water occupied is not the result of a conquest. Rather, it is a fragment of imaginary geography, which seems to have come to moor temporarily, as if to pay a visit to the land of men. The Arteplage Neuchâtel, with its faux pebbles and synthetic reed vegetation, is a new way of living on the water, raising the question of urban development in a new way. And this method of construction on stilts also recalls, like a distant and fading memory, the presence of lakeside villages in the Three-Lakes region.
Man is constantly staging his environment, either because he chooses to or because he is forced to. Artifice and nature are not opposites; in Neuchâtel, the aim is to show how they combine in the contemporary world. The dialectic theme of the Arteplage can be understood as a contemporary concern to better control the reality and future of the environment. From the water, from this sheet stretched out over the waves, visitors will be able to look at the city and the development of civilisation in a different way, from an off-centre and unusual point of view.
Exhibit
What does the notion of exhibition mean at Expo.02? The exhibition is a visual construction that shows and offers the possibility of seeing better. A universal language, it touches on communication, culture and entertainment. Expo.02 is a marvellous visual machine for everyone, touching the senses and appealing to the emotions, experience, sensitivity and intelligence.
From my position as Director General, I can draw the following perspective: unlike traditional national exhibitions, which illustrated a general theme in a synthetic way, Expo.02 presents a random plurality of themes, each with its own specificity. Expo.02 presents a random plurality of exhibitions, each as different as the next. This abundance of proposals, each with its own point of view, seems to me to be the most original aspect of Expo.02.
Our project does not see itself as a collage of exhibitions juxtaposed for the “needs of the cause”, you might say, but as a confrontation, through randomness and diversity, of a new mode of expression and reading of the present. In other words, our reading resembles the activity of an archaeologist: faced with the tangle of strata that have been shuffled, fallen, mixed and blended in his field, the archaeologist connects the eras and the different stages in the history of a place. Visitors themselves, in their imagination and through the experience of the event, will construct the total edifice of which we present scattered elements, assembled according to the chance of multiple temporalities, diverse creativity and the material possibilities of realisation.
Experience Expo
The Arteplages will host exhibitions as well as numerous theatrical, artistic and musical events. While retaining its Expo title - like the memory of previous national exhibitions - the Expo we are preparing is a major cultural gathering.
With its welcome, its atmosphere, its gastronomy, with the multiple itineraries it offers to move from one Arteplage to another, from one architecture to another, from one theme to another, from one exhibition to another and from one event to another, Expo.02 indicates, reveals and underlines our modernity. It is a paradoxical event: a total celebration, but a totality that is deliberately fragmented, folded, stratified and mixed, like the times we live in and the civilisation we are building. Between the order of the old national exhibitions and the disorder of a random assembly, Expo.02 suggests, like our era, that the chaos of today's world can find a provisional arrangement, provided that individuals take the freedom to build it, to think it and to decide its meaning.
The meaning of Switzerland
When I talk about the links between Expo and Switzerland, I see various possible objections.
How can we talk about Switzerland when, by virtue of its status, its modus operandi and its lack of a founding message, Expo does not provide a direct vision of Switzerland? Is this exhibition national in name only? Is it an event that we would not have dared to abolish from our history? Would we tolerate it out of indifference? And having explained the meaning of the project in terms of breakthroughs and decentralisation, how can we still talk about a homeland and a reason for being together? Because, I'm told, what makes a homeland is precisely its unity, its totality, its visible centres of power and its own purpose. How do you describe Switzerland at Expo.02 when you're constructing a torn scenography and a fragmented meaning?
To answer this question, I will again draw on my experience of the project.
A national exhibition today: an experiment
Attention should be drawn to the following paradox: Expo.02 is truly national, but it does not, in its initial aim, present a representation of Switzerland or the idea we have of it. Previous national exhibitions had the explicit aim - and the times demanded it - of translating a certain idea of Switzerland, staging it and making it explicit throughout a pre-established programme. Today, Expo.02, from within its organisation, functions like a double view. It already reflects today's complex Switzerland, which needs to be perceived not as an ordered synthesis but as a series of continuities and breaks, of traditions and unsuspected emergences. This projection means saying goodbye to a Switzerland that is matrix-like, totalising and all-encompassing, a Switzerland made up of identifiable and reassuring centres. The Switzerland we are showing does not refer to an idea stated once and for all, but to identities that are constantly being redefined. It proposes a Switzerland that can be experienced through the practical method of uncertainty that I experience every day.
Although a number of events at Expo.02 will reflect our country, the purpose of our Exhibition is primarily different. It is to materialise a vision and a method for experimenting with our time and the type of civilisation that is developing within it. I want Expo.02 to be seen as an experimental space, a kind of laboratory for experimenting with randomness and power, with fragmentation and networking.
The spirit of discovery and experimentation will also prevail during the 159 days of Expo.02. The event will allow us, through the same method and the same gaze, to put ourselves in harmony, in confrontation, in play with the type of civilisation imagined in our creative space. From then on, the problem changes. It's not a question of seeing what image of Switzerland Expo.02 conveys, but I think it's important to emphasise that Expo.02, in its method, in its practice and in its experimentation, engages and produces a new vision of Switzerland.
I must admit that the ambition of Expo.02 in its relationship with Switzerland is immense.
Observation
At the head of Expo.02, I am confronted daily with Switzerland and with being Swiss. What kind of Switzerland have I discovered, seen in action in the present, experienced and looked forward to in the future? Which Switzerland have I encountered and which Switzerland have I invented for myself? I saw three types of Switzerland: one of boldness and generosity; another of withdrawal and self-centredness; and a third of indifference, denial and rejection.
Expo.02 is a powerful reminder that there is a capacity for risk-taking and daring in this country, a willingness to take the plunge - and this suits the Arteplages well, anchored to the shore but buffeted by whirlpools and currents. From the economic to the cultural, this country is alive with activity. Expo.02 is a product of this effervescence. But at the same time, I discovered a Switzerland that is afraid, that doesn't dare, that counts and re-counts. I experienced this at Expo.02, just as I experienced a third Switzerland, one that is indifferent to itself, that denies itself, that no longer has any desire to express itself. Linked to the recriminations directed at Expo.02 itself, this attitude expresses a profound doubt about the notion of Swiss identity, and more seriously about the reason for our being Swiss.
These three Swiss interviews make me wonder: - Does Expo.02 say something about the self-centredness, lack of daring and self-satisfaction that dominate today, and can Expo.02 make a promise, however tenuous, to those for whom being Swiss means little?
Faced with these difficult questions, I maintain that our Exhibition's ambition is first and foremost to express contemporary civilisation and Switzerland in the world to which it belongs. You can criticise the language that Expo.02 uses to describe “Me and the Universe”, “Instant and Eternity”, “Power and Liberty”, “Nature and Artificiality”, “Meaning and Motion”, but the guiding themes of the Arteplages should allow everyone to take a step back, to get out of their own way, to experience a different approach to the world and to Switzerland. Then, each of us will put to the test the new method we have learned through travelling, wandering and moving around the world. In this way, freedom can give itself the power to glimpse another Switzerland. In this way, differentiation and decentring form the basis of a new identification.
From my own experience, I dare say that Expo.02, at this very stage of the preparations, allows me to imagine this other possible Switzerland. As I go from the outermost to the innermost reaches of Expo.02, a Switzerland is taking shape in my mind in two ways: seeing and envisioning.
See
Expo.02 functions like an optical machine that allows us to see and hear a world of folds, of breaks, of emergences behind appearances. Learning to see in a different way, a fragmented way, has led me to see myself in a different way in the country. And even now, in the light of what I saw at Expo.02, Switzerland is no longer the same.
The Exhibition we are preparing is a representation of the Switzerland we see. The representation is a substitute that takes the place of the real object. It involves an act of substitution: a mechanism that replaces one thing with another, created from scratch. Expo.02 proposes a transposed vision of the country, with the creation of another object. It will express Switzerland, but in its own way, producing other reactions, a different symbolism, a different possibility.
Consider
What we experience at Expo.02 as a way of operating, as a source of action and as the meaning of the project, allows us to maintain the possible paths of a Switzerland of tomorrow. At Expo.02, we could have celebrated a globalised world, economically open and conquering, technologically efficient; we could also have arranged the signs of a self-centred, closed Switzerland, celebrating its eternal Swissness.
Alternatively, we could have put the spotlight back on the originality of an unchanging Swiss way, forever establishing a kind of country “apart”. We did not follow these three temptations because the dichotomised vision of a Switzerland separated from the world or surrounded by it seems to us to be a delusion, unsuited to the type of civilisation that Expo.02 wishes to propose for experimentation.
That's why we've adopted a random methodology that interweaves, mixes and intertwines the disparate elements of a world exhibition and a national exhibition. The result is a Switzerland of the future that is more open to all the world's experiences, a Switzerland that is fully in tune with the times.
The stakes of the event
The concern that I share with all those working on Expo.02 is first and foremost to make a success of our project. We know that we will be inaugurating it in a year's time. We don't yet know how well it will live up to its initial objectives. There are always forces of standardisation at work, and there is a risk - and there's no point in kidding ourselves - of ending up with an event that is billed as completely innovative, only to be overtaken by a certain suisso-correct conformism. The challenge is immense: to keep open, creative and dissident the promise announced by Expo.02. And I, for one, am well aware of the risk and the ridiculousness of launching an appeal on the meaning of the project and finding myself at the helm of what dreamed of being a great and risky expedition that would only offer an organised, pleasant and expensive tour of the beautiful Swiss lakes.
Faced with this obligation to succeed through innovation, I invite those who have committed themselves to embarking on an uncertain expedition not to tie themselves down today to a share of certainty. The authors of the exhibition projects, the directors, the artists preparing the events, the sponsors, together we must organise an event of discontinuity in this country that loves nothing so much as continuity.
The festival we are preparing will only be fully successful if the entire population of Switzerland is involved. In that way, it will be truly popular. I fully accept the paradox of defining a project that is demanding in its issues and concepts and calling for popular participation. Quite simply, I believe that Expo.02 is not an event like any other, that it remains a national exhibition with a specific meaning that everyone expects, in addition to spectacle and entertainment.
An ethic of the self
The gathering and the celebration, the reading of the meaning and the experience of Expo are aimed first and foremost at the main actor in the event: the individual himself. I know that it's fashionable these days, in business, politics and culture, to highlight the individual and his or her creativity. But the individual I have in mind, although rooted in a long philosophical history, is in no way abstract in my eyes: it is a person as I meet him every day, as I experience him in my work for Expo.02. This individual believes that he can make a difference; he takes risks, knows how to deal with uncertainty and is able to recognise the strengths of his time in fragmented offerings. This individual can only act if he remains mobile, if he takes on new roles, if he exchanges them. And this individual knows that, in the end, he will do nothing on his own and that he must develop new ways of living together. The paradox of defining a project that is demanding in its issues and concepts and calling for popular participation. Quite simply, I believe that Expo.02 is not an event like any other, that it remains a national exhibition with a specific meaning that everyone expects, in addition to spectacle and entertainment.
At the Arteplages in Yverdon-les-Bains (Me and the Universe) and Biel-Bienne (Power and Liberty), Expo.02 is asking two questions: “How can I take care of myself?” and “Who decides about me?”
Our era is marked by the injunction “Take care of yourself”. The rule of life “Take care of yourself” invites people to transform themselves throughout their lives. There's no shortage of modern expressions for this: “coming back to yourself”, “being yourself”, “realising yourself”. Arteplage Yverdon-les-Bains offers a critical confrontation between man and himself. To “transform oneself” also means to move, to follow a trajectory, to make an effort. At Yverdon-les-Bains, the individual is seen as evolving and returning to himself. We want Expo to be an opportunity for the individual to meet his inner self, a sine qua non for meeting others, society and power.
Through its multi-faceted interpretation of the Arteplages Yverdon-les-Bains and Biel-Bienne, Expo.02 promotes the possibility of forming an ethic of the self today. By linking the question of man to that of power (who decides about me?), Expo.02 connects the individual to the collective. The political and the human are thus united by the establishment of a rule that applies to life and society. By returning to themselves and their unique identity, visitors find themselves in a place of belonging and peace. The exhibition offers a new experience of the individual and the homeland. An experience that will enable each individual and all of us together to forge new bonds of solidarity. This civilisation born of the relationship between “who decides about me?” and “concern for oneself” will define power and the individual as a unity of interchangeable and never definitive relationships. Expo.02 will herald a new ethic of the self, an urgent and fundamental task with a clear political purpose.
The individual on tour
The individual is at the heart of Expo.02. This is something new, because in previous exhibitions the focus was on values, abstract figures and unifying themes. Today, Expo is aimed at the individual, those who live in Switzerland, but also those who come from abroad, all those who go out to meet the world. While the themes of Arteplages and most of the planned exhibitions raise questions about the individual, the individual is also the purpose of Expo.02.
As we have seen, our national exhibition has no centre, and even rejects all forms of centrality. The idea that the individual will be at the centre of Expo.02 is gaining ground. It is the individual, embodied in the visitor-actor, who will bring together the many and sometimes contradictory proposals of the Expo. If Expo.02 is presented as a network of connections with Switzerland and with the world, a network that is both dispersed and intertwined, the individual visitor-actor will link the elements together, compose personal syntheses, and refine the provisional joints and cohesions. Then Expo.02 will have a centre, a centre that is both multiple and singular. This centrality will not contain the unique meaning of Expo, but will construct one for personal use.
The terms deconstruction and dissemination, eminently contemporary concepts, seem to me to be appropriate to express our world. They are at work in the Exhibition through the variety of exhibitions and events, which nevertheless assert genuine positions on a given issue. We want the diversity of the exhibitions to be seen as complementary, mutually enriching or even opposing and contradictory. This diversity is a quality and a specificity of Expo.02. If Expo wants to appeal to everyone, it will be neither in the sense of a levelling of proposals, nor in the search for a sort of common denominator of culture and knowledge. Expo is for everyone in the sense that it offers a possible network of hypotheses, answers, questions and suggestions around the chosen themes. Each visitor will be confronted with the diversity of the proposals, invited to question themselves and make their own choices.
Final
I often say to myself that this event will live more in the memory of the individual than it will mark the territory. Of the National Exhibition, as of any other major event, I would like people to be able to say: ‘I remember’. Expo does not want to build a new Swiss monument for Switzerland. If the ephemeral is to have a dimension of eternity, it seems to me that only individual memory can take on this function of transmission. As we all know, our century has brought the figure of the witness to the fore. In direct contact with current events, which they pass on through their accounts, witnesses become essential players in the construction of history. The individual we will meet at Expo.02 will identify with the witness to a cultural and political event, and will be its legatee, invited to give his or her own account of the event.
15.05.2001 Nelly Wenger
