Performance, 5.00 pm
Hollow Square
Ronja Svaneborg
Kasernenareal (portico), Zeughausareal Zürich

OTO Sound Museum is pleased to announce that on Saturday, 19 September 2026, at 5pm, artist Ronja Svaneborg presents a large-scale choral performance in the passage of Kasernenareal. The work marks the final intervention of OTO Sound Museum’s three-year programme at Zeughausareal in Zurich, before the museum relocates.

The piece, Hollow Square, is a site-responsive vocal intervention performed by 16 singers. Using a hollow-square vocal formation inspired by Sacred Harp singing—a participatory a cappella tradition rooted in Protestant shape-note practice—the work activates the military architecture as a resonant body and immerses the audience in a decentralised, polyphonic sonic experience that reflects on the site’s layered history. By placing all participants within a shared acoustic field, the project explores questions of collectivity, belonging, and control. Through a musical composition written and directed by the artist specifically for the space, Hollow Square proposes a temporary configuration that suggests a possible symbolic and physical transition of corporeality—human, architectural, and social—in which shared listening becomes an active practice, one that can be entered, negotiated, or resisted.

For the intervention, the artist created garments for the singers, drawing on the first camouflage pattern adopted by the Swiss Army - the Zelteinheiten 1901, introduced in 1938 and originally printed on tarp halves designed to be fastened together into tents. By replacing its original palette with colours sampled from the site – grey concrete, yellow timber panels, vibrant graffiti and tags - the pattern becomes a site-specific urban camouflage for the passage as it stands today. Wrapped, tied and joined through grommets, straps and cord, the garments redistribute the boundaries between singers and their architectural, historical and sonic environment, merging separate bodies into a collective mass.

The intervention is curated by Zaira Oram [Francesca Ceccherini].

Performers: Bettina Diel, Sophia Fries, Constanza Pellicci, Sarah Eicher, Karin Schwarzbek, Esther Kempf, Clara Khan, Miriam Cotting, Dana Borich, Marina Mello, Emily Suchy, Mathias Vetter, Daniel Treystman, Henning Hinrichsen, Harry Beardmore, Robert Bilic

The project is supported by:
Pro Helvetia, Swiss Council
Kanton Zürich
Stadt Zürich
Land Vorarlberg
Bildrecht
Migros Kultur Prozent
Stiftung Anne-Marie Schindler

bio

Ronja Svaneborg is a Danish multidisciplinary artist and composer based in Zurich. Working across sculpture, installation, performance, composition and experimental score-making, her practice centres on polyphonic voicing and collective listening as embodied, relational phenomena. Through spatialised vocal works and immersive sonic environments, she explores attunement, resonance, and the ambivalence of synchrony. Her work has been performed and exhibited at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (CH), Kunstraum Dornbirn (AT), Hordaland Kunstsenter (NO), Open Source Gallery (US), Vermilion Sands (DK), DOCK 20 (AT), Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art (UK), Ausstellungsraum Klingenthal (CH), Necessaire (AT), Künstlerhaus Bregenz (AT), AUTO (CH), Palazzina (CH)
Ronja is currently a PhD candidate at Zurich University of the Arts (CH) and University of Arts Linz (AT). She studied fine art at The Glasgow School of Art (UK) and Zurich University of the Arts (CH).

www.ronjasvaneborg.com