Heinz Nigg

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Heinz Nigg in front of the monument for the Autonomous Youth Center (AJZ) in Zurich. Photo: Urs Jaudas, 2015

Heinz Nigg (born August 23, 1949 in Zurich ) is a Swiss ethnologist , cultural mediator and promoter of participatory video and film making. In 1980 he documented the beginning of the youth unrest in Zurich .

Life

Nigg, a citizen of Maienfeld and Zurich , grew up with two siblings in Zurich. His parents come from a working class and a farming family in Maienfeld. The mother was a housewife and worked as a seamstress. The father worked as a landlord in a foundation for affordable housing.

In 1967/68, Nigg spent a year as an exchange student in the USA, where he was inspired by the dawn of the 1968 movement , the hippies and yippies, to become artistically and politically active in Chicago and San Francisco . From 1969 to 1976 he studied history, political science and ethnology at the University of Zurich , was an activist in the youth movement and in the local resistance art scene. He wrote exhibition reviews on Conceptual Art and Minimal Art for the Tages-Anzeiger and Kunstnachrichten , a magazine for international art. In 1974 he traveled to New York as assistant to Johannes Gachnang , director of the Kunsthalle Bern, where he met the artist On Kawara and became a reference person in his project I Got Up. In 1975 he worked for Isi Fiszman in the international art event Salto Arte in Brussels. From 1976 to 1979, Nigg lived in London, where he carried out ethnographic field research on the use of audiovisual means in community arts and community organizing , which was published as a dissertation in 1980 and published as a book in the UK. From 1979 to 1980 he was a lecturer at the Department of Ethnology at the University of Zurich. Because of a controversial video documentation of the opera house riot , he was denied further teaching at the university.

Video Opera house riot, Zurich 1980. Community Media project group

Since 1980 Nigg has been working as a freelance ethnologist and cultural worker. His focus is on social movements, video work with groups, participation in urban development and the representation of migration and mobility experiences through personal testimonies. Heinz Nigg mainly works with portraits based on the method of oral history . In 2017, Nigg curated the exhibition Rebel Video for the Swiss National Museum about the alternative video movement of the 1970s and 1980s in Switzerland and Great Britain. He also deals with media art and photography again and again .

Heinz Nigg has one son and lives in Zurich.

Publications

As an author or editor

  • Rebel video. The video movement of the 1970s and 1980s. London, Basel, Bern, Lausanne and Zurich. Zurich 2017, Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess, ISBN 978-3-85881-556-9 .
  • Rebel video. The Video Movement of the 1970s and 1980s. London, Basel, Bern, Lausanne, and Zurich. Zurich 2017, Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess, ISBN 978-3-85881-801-0 .
  • Global Town Baden. 30 portraits from an urban region. Zurich 2010, Limmat Verlag, ISBN 978-3-85791-617-5 .
  • We are few, but we are all. Biographies from the 68 generation in Switzerland . Zurich 2008, Limmat Verlag, ISBN 978-3-85791-546-8 .
  • We want everything, subito. The eighties youth riots in Switzerland and their consequences. With video compilation on DVD and website. Zurich 2001, Limmat Verlag (out of print), ISBN 3-85791-375-4 .
  • Here and there. Life in two worlds. Immigration and internal migration in Switzerland . Zurich 1999, Limmat Verlag, ISBN 3-85791-331-2 .
  • Together with Martin Heller and Claude Lichtenstein. Latvians it be. A city and its problem. Zurich 1995, series 19 of the Museum für Gestaltung, ISBN 3-907065-58-1 .
  • Together with Margrit Bürer. VIDEO: Video work with children and young people. Zurich 1990: Pro Juventute Verlag, out of print, ISBN 3-7152-0186-X .
  • Together with Graham Wade. Community media. Community Communication in the UK: video, local TV, film, and photography. A documentary report on six groups. Zurich / London 1980: Regenbogen Verlag. ISBN 3-85862-010-6 .

Contributions to edited volumes

  • The eighties - portrait of a movement . In: Peter Bichsel , Silvan Lerch: Autonomy on A4. How the Zurich youth movement set standards. Leaflets 1979-82. Zurich 2017, Limmat Verlag, pp. 233–240, ISBN 978-3-85791-833-9 .
  • Sans-papiers on their March for Freedom 2014: how refugees and undocumented migrants challenge Fortress Europe. In: Interface. A journal for and about social movements. Vol 7 (1): i – iv (May 2015) Movement practice (s) , pp. 263-288.
  • Eye opener: looted art and refugee goods are reminiscent of the Holocaust. In: Thomas Buomberger, Guido Magnaguagno (Ed.): Black Book Bührle. Looted art for the Kunsthaus Zürich? Zurich 2015, Rotpunktverlag, pp. 217–231, ISBN 978-3-85869-664-9 .
  • Youth Protest Media in Switzerland . In: John DH Downing (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media . Thousand Oaks, California 2011, SAGE Publications, pp. 555-558, ISBN 978-0-7619-2688-7 .
  • The revolution also takes place in the hall . In: Urs Kälin, Stefan Keller, Rebekka Wyler (eds.): Hundred Years Volkshaus Zurich. Move. Place. Story . Zurich 2010, here + now, pp. 72–81, ISBN 978-3-03919-149-9 .
  • The alternative video movement - a transnational phenomenon. In: Urs Berger, Ruedi Bind, Julia Zutavern, Adam Szymczxk (eds.): Filmfront (al). The experimental and political film of the 1970s and 1980s in Basel . Basel 2010, Friedrich Reinhardt Verlag, pp. 27–32, ISBN 978-3-7245-1657-6 .
  • Violence and symbolic resistance in the youth riots of the 1980s. In: Sønke Gau, Katharina Schlieben. Spectacle, pleasure principle or the carnival-like style? A reader about possibilities, experiences of difference and strategies of the Carnavalesque in cultural / political practice . Berlin 2008, b_books, pp. 141–150, ISBN 978-3-933557-78-0 .
  • The Xenixen. Four portraits from a multicultural cinema in Zurich . In: Veronika Grob, René Moser, Beat Schneider (eds.): XENIX - cinema as a program . Zurich 2006, Schüren Verlag, pp. 68–93, ISBN 3-89472-403-X .
  • Express yourself. Video as a Resistant Practice in the Youth Movement of the 1980s . In: Andreas Broekmann, Rudolf Frieling (Ed.): Bandwidth. Media between art and politics. Berlin 2004, Kulturverlag Kadmos, pp. 69–74, ISBN 3-931659-65-8 .
  • Cake with Elsbeth. «Jungi makes TV!» Video work with children and young people, Zurich, summer 1980 . In: CINEMA. Independent Swiss film magazine, Volume 26, Number 3/80, pp. 23–31.

Interviews

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Participatory video and counter-public .
  2. ↑ The 1968 movement in the USA was documented on film by the Newsreel Collective. The film documents can be viewed in the archives of Third World Newsreel , New York.
  3. ^ Heinz Nigg: An art trip to New York. Tages-Anzeiger Magazin No. 2, January 11, 1975, pp. 26-29
  4. ↑ Video documentation of Salto Arte on the online platform Le Salon
  5. ^ Heinz Nigg and Graham Wade: Community Media. Community Communication in the UK: video, local TV, film, and photography. A documentary report on six groups. Regenbogen Verlag, 1980, accessed on February 2, 2018 (English).
  6. ↑ Peter Fiddick. Putting the word around . In: Guardian, UK, May 13, 1980. Link: https://theguardian.newspapers.com/image/259514282/?terms=community%2Bmedia%2Bwade%2Bnigg
  7. ↑ Cf. Rolf Probala: Video interviews on the history of ethnology in Zurich. With Annik Tonti, Danielle Bazzi, Hanspeter Müller, Heinz Nigg and Mario Erdheim. Institute for Social Anthropology and Empirical Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich, Zurich 2016, online .
  8. ↑ Christian Schmid: Explore the city with video. In: Heinz Nigg: Rebel Video. The video movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich 2017, p. 232 ff. Can be viewed as a video portrait on the online platform Rebel Video, subtitled in German and English .
  9. ↑ Jonathan Benthall. The attack on Professor Loeffler . RAIN. Royal Anthropological Institute News, London 1981, Number 43
  10. ↑ Together with Margrit Bürer, cf. Practical video work with children and young people (PDF, 36 MB).
  11. ↑ See, for example, the Global Town Baden project with video portraits on the globalization of an urban region in Switzerland.
  12. ^ The project There and Away. Life in Two Worlds is the first portrayal of the history of migration in Switzerland from 1945–2000 in personal testimonies. The project is available online on D, F, I and E.
  13. ^ Swiss television SRF Tagesschau. Videos from the eighties in the Landesmuseum . August 19, 2017, 7:30 p.m. Link: https://www.srf.ch/play/tv/tagesschau/video/videos-aus-den-achtzigern-im-landesmuseum?id=8160ea67-dfa2-4d7d-9f72-b1900642fa11&station=69e8ac16-4327-4af4- b873-fd5cd6e895a7
  14. ↑ Katrin Schregenberger: "Züri brännt" was not just a video. It was politics . Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), August 31, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Nigg, Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss ethnologist, cultural worker and video activist
DATE OF BIRTH August 23, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Zurich