A Billboard Outside Zurich Main Station
- SITE_SPECIFIC
- Jul 25
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 29
I first noticed the installation in February on my commute home from Basel. Still wallowing in my latest identity crisis, I was momentarily caught off guard by a familiar phrase leaping out at me – the striking font, New Edge 666, was created by Charlotte Rohde in 2021. Stark white against a darkening sky, the words 'Que la honte change de camp' (Shame must change sides) seemed to beckon to train passengers at eye-level. Is that a Giselle Pélicot quote? Not here, across the tracks from Europaallee, a CHF 310 Mio. redevelopment project of which the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) owns a large percentage. The incongruousness of the idea in this location, of course, is part of the installation’s effectiveness.
The brainchild of the Swiss feminist association créatrices – originally proposed by the architect Nelly Pilz – the BILLBOARD project will occupy the small patch of grass outside the Kalkbreite housing cooperative for the year 2025, having been financed through crowdfunding, sponsorships and collective memberships. The association held a call for non-English phrases; 848 were submitted. Twelve of these will be featured throughout the year. Some of the messages are proscriptive: 'Für mehr Schutz von Carearbeiter:innen,' (Greater protection for care workers) others address those in power 'Dein Atem im Nacken,' (Your breath at my neck) still others pose candid questions to consumers in a culture long marked by male privilege: 'Wann wurdest du zuletzt mit einer Werbung für Körperhaarentfernung konfrontiert?' (When was the last time you encountered an ad for hair removal?) The phrases span the gamut from what are now commonly and, often, pejoratively referred to as cultural or identity politics issues to materialist concerns, such as income disparity and the valuation of care and sex work. The phrases recall the word art of postmodernist feminist artists of the late 1970s, 80s and 90s, such as Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and the Guerilla Girls. In 1977, as a student, Holzer started copying out one-line quotes or 'truisms' from her readings, which she then printed cheaply as posters and hung around New York City. Eventually they were emblazoned onto t-shirts and baseball caps. In 1982 her truisms occupied the signboard in Times Square, and they have been projected in public space and on famous landmarks repeatedly since. Phrases such as 'Abuse of power comes as no surprise,' 'Protect me from what I want' and 'Raise boys and girls the same,' glow in clear sans-serif font – Holzer even emblazoned Zurich’s Predigerplatz with changing phrases in German in 2009. Whether in the form of billboards or projections, Holzer has continued to appropriate spaces usually reserved for advertising to overtly political ends. When they first occupied public space in the early ‘80s, these messages delivered efficient shocks to a society engulfed in neoliberalism that had already suppressed the feminist gains of the previous decades. It is no surprise Holzer’s truisms were adopted by the MeToo movement, with the 'Not Surprised' art group calling out sexual harassment in the artworld in her name.
This year at the Frauenstreik (womens’ strike) in Zurich, an annual intersectional and transnational march and protest on 14th June, a protestor climbed the monument to Alfred Escher, the Swiss politician and businessman, whose wealth was tied to slavery in Cuba, to hang a banner with the German translation of Pélicot’s phrase: 'Die Scham muss die Seite wechseln'. With her statement, Pélicot was not merely speaking out against the patriarchy as an obviously sinister force. She was making a point about a mechanism built into many legal systems – namely, victim anonymity – that purports to protect victims of sexual violence but instead is a product of patriarchal thinking that helps maintain the veil of secrecy and shame that enables further abuse. As Sophie Smith remarked about the Pélicot trial in the London Review of Books, 'The point is not that all men are rapists-in-waiting, nor that all women who put their trust in men are at risk. The point is that patriarchy puts women in a sceptical scenario, making the distinction between the men you can and can’t trust difficult to draw.'
She also notes that if men are not to abuse their power, they ought to take this sceptical scenario seriously and be open to a conversation about the ways their desires are shaped. The billboard is an unselfconscious insistence that we stop sparing men the discomfort of engaging in such discussions and start questioning the less obvious, paternalistic aspects of our systems that allow business as usual to continue.
The second phrase takes the self-referential a step further: 'Wenn hier stehen würde, dass wir alle gleichberechtigt sind, würdest du es glauben?' (If it were stated here that we all have the same rights, would you believe it?) The success of this phrasing is that we as viewers are already invited to distrust the premise that we all have the same rights. As the oft-seen exasperated demonstration slogan goes: 'My arms are tired from holding up this sign for the past x years.' Feminisms have shifted in space and time: liberal, radical, socialist, white, Black, intersectional and ecological, and have by accounts entered a fourth wave powered by social media, while many in global south countries have long striven for the kind of political enfranchisement achieved in the global north over a century ago. What I find powerful about the BILLBOARD project and its precursor in Holzer’s projections, is that, through its public address and its broad subject matter, it posits feminism, now and always, as a fundamental critique of power relations of all kinds. Vives les créatrices et vive le peuple!
Text by Hella Wiedmer-Newman
Co-published with Reading Rämistrasse by Kunsthalle Zurich
