ZHdK Research Tours

Join research-driven tours offering exclusive behind-the-scenes access to unique locations across the city, guided by emerging curators.

Anja Roosens

ZHdK Research Tours Sumatra(?)strasse: A landscape to deconstruct

Description:

What stories do everyday environments reveal or conceal? This tour is a participatory invitation to look closer. A street name in Kreis 6 becomes an entry point into colonial entanglements embedded in the city and invites you to question the familiar. By tracing photography as an archival medium, we will explore ways in which collective memory is formed, and the role ‘naming’ plays in the process. The route continues by looking at a group of insects at the ETH Entomological Collection, where we connect the discussion to the history of the institution. At the upper end of the street, the tour concludes at Galerie Oskar Weiss, connecting to Laura Langer’s contemporary works reflecting on space and the everyday. By moving between past and present, observing and drawing connections, the urban landscape can be seen as more than just a backdrop as we ask what is needed for its (re-)construction. As a vessel of memory, desire, and imagination, it holds traces of what was, what remains, and what has been erased.

Meeting point: Tram Station Haldenegg, 8006 Zurich

1.5 hours | EN

Bio

Anja Roosens (*2001) is a mediator and emerging curator, with an interest in photography and early modern history, currently pursuing a master’s degree in Curatorial Studies at Zurich University of the Arts. Sourcing from her background in Art History at the University of Bern and her time at the Precollege in Art and Design at HSLU DFK, she explores questions of archiving, museum history, and critical mediation, with particular attention to the mundane and its potential to evoke connections to stories yet to be told.