Old Masters
Total plastic works
Swiss Performing Arts Award 2024
The actor and dramaturge Marius Schaffter (born 1980), the scenographer and visual artist Jérôme Stünzi (born 1981) and the author, visual artist and scenographer Sarah André alias André André (born 1984) founded the Geneva-based theatre collective Old Masters in 2014. They view a theatrical production as a total plastic work and create worlds with an unusual and radical aesthetic, appropriating a wide range of practices and discourses for each project, be they artistic, everyday, political or even scientific. Absurdity, sincerity, irony, beauty and sadness are their favourite tools for a shared investigation of what freedom might mean today – a freedom that is localised, fluid and always searching for itself. Each of the three members also works on various solo projects as well as collaborating with other artists such as Nicholas Stücklin, Sofia Teillet, Joana Oliveira, Charlotte Herzig, Jonas Bühler and Jérémy Chevalier
Their latest piece Home of My Spirit (2022), aimed at a young audience between the ages of five and ten, is currently delighting both young and old in several language versions in Switzerland and abroad, for example at the opening of the jungspund theatre festival in St. Gallen in spring 2024. It tells the story of Jonathan, who visits Kim, Klöb and Mauro and finds a kind of refuge in playing with objects where the world we think we know can be reinvented. Old Masters give a nod to sustainability by constructing their first work for a young audience from elements of past works. The first of these, Constructionisme (2014), is rather like a two-man lecture by Marius Schaffter and Jérôme Stünzi, highly comical and largely improvised, in which they pick apart an object in dialogue with the audience and thus also act as art critics. It won the Premio award in 2015 and continues to tour – also in museums. Other works are Fresque (2016), L’impression (2018), Le Monde (2019) and Bande originale (2021), which remain in the repertoire.
In hard times like these, fraught with environmental, cultural, social and political problems, the work done by the collective Old Masters is especially valuable because it goes beyond the bounds of activism. Old Masters rises to the challenge of combating the negative and destructive absurdity that has our world in its grip through the positive and constructive absurdity of its artistic output. By creating literally fantastic worlds, the Geneva-based collective shows us new ways to explore space, time, materiality and relationships and ultimately face up to our own lives. This is something today’s society urgently needs in order to look ahead to the future.
Demis Quadri, Jury member
