Irene Tabanelli

Irene travels in a yellow van, creating works in motion and engaging directly with the places and times that surround her. Rather than bringing the world into a fixed studio, her practice brings the studio into the landscape, engaging with the uniqueness of each place she encounters as stages in a broader journey of exploration and transformation of life into art.
Her practice draws on K. F. E. Trahndorff’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, literally a “total work of art”, embracing an expanded and collective vision of art. Performance is an integral part of this approach, creating a direct relationship between artist, artwork, and audience.

Reflections on Zahn der Zeit and Art Dock, Zürich:

How does context shape your artistic process?

Building bridges, forged connections, and invisible yet powerful bonds that illuminate the multifaceted nature of our practice, to absorb influence and to project it in turn: the essence of a group exhibition lies precisely in being part of an organism that expands and contracts like a beating heart.
I felt seamlessly integrated into a collective family, a complex, self-supporting ecosystem existing in symbiosis with the surrounding works and artists. My practice centers on the nuanced space between internal and external, public and private, thought and voice. Here, process is creation: every external catalyst indelibly reshapes its form, offering a fresh perspective and new clarity to the final piece.
One moment brought a profound sense of alignment with another artist. Despite the rapid, spontaneous nature of the setting, Dana and I threw ourselves into a performance driven purely by improvisation and deep listening. These elements acted as the engine for our gestures and sounds, building a composition where our bodies merged with the space, inviting the audience to experience themselves as note, material, and movement.
Through this performance, I accessed a visceral sense of freedom, conceived not just as liberation from the physical weight of matter, but as a spiritual elevation toward inner stillness: a state of balance between container and contained.

How did Art Under Dock shape your performance?

It was an absolute, incredible experience, yet one that provoked deep reflection. Questions naturally surfaced after learning about the history of this cultural space and the people who inhabit it, bring it to life, and resist alongside it each day.
I was profoundly struck by how this serves as a textbook example of a city in transformation, gradually turning rigid, monolithic, and concrete-bound. It is an urban shift that systematically erases the colors, organic forms, and cultural biosphere built on years of struggle and hard-won progress, progress that is now being silenced and overwhelmed by sterile hypertrophy and an alienating form of globalization.

Can art serve as a lifeline for spaces like the Art Dock? Can we actively push back against the progressive flattening of the cultural landscape? Can we, as artists, advocate for a world that rejects privatization and fosters a broader vision rooted in community and shared existence? Is it utopian? Perhaps.
Yet a part of me remains deeply convinced that art is vindication, community-building, and a universal language capable of conveying complex human values through a single mark, a single gesture, or a stroke of color.
For me, creating art is an act of resistance and resilience in a world that disenfranchises minorities and dismisses the voices of the youth. To practice art in a space like the Art Dock is to take a firm political and cultural stance; doing so collectively felt like piercing the darkness, a reminder that a glimmer of hope still exists and endures. Art still holds the power to liberate us from the shackles of a broken society corrupted by the pursuit of wealth.