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THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL DADA FESTIVAL: SIHLPAPIER / ZÜRICH, SWITZERLAND, 2003

In the Plattenstrasse, Pastor Leumund, the crew of squatters from the Cabaret Voltaire
and I planned the second Dada festival weeks with an intention of staging them on
the vast grounds of the former Sihlpapier factory. Here for over two hundred years the
Zurich paper factory in Gieshübelstrasse (Wiedikon neighborhood, District 3) was the
most important industrial site along Zurich‘s Sihl River. In the mid-80s production
was discontinued, and since that time the area lay idle. In 1990 the site was occupied
for the first time by political and cultural activists. Police moved on the same evening,
evicting persons from the entire site. Afterwards, various artists continued to submit
applications to the site management for use. They might as well have banged their
head against a brick wall, to which they at least might have charged admission. The
landlord, Karl Steiner AG, had zero interest in art projects and fumed instead about
Ursula Koch, the urban planning councilor, who kept refusing to grant the permission for their redevelopment project “Utopark”. When a group of punks moved into
one of many derelict halls in the summer of‚ 98, not only were they promptly kicked
out, but also several factory buildings were razed to the ground. In an ensuing legal
brouhaha it was attempted to make the squatters compensate for demolition costs of
up to 100,000 francs.

In February of 2003 we had better luck in our Dada squatters’ incarnation, and
the 2nd Dada festival weeks carried on the tradition at the Sihlpapier site unhindered
thanks to our good contacts in the Department of Culture. On opening night, visitors
were lured to Plattenstrasse for a swing orchestra concert, where they became witness, via a live broadcast onto a projection screen, of the factory doors being broken
in and were prompted to attend the ceremony in the just-opened actual venue.

 The
Sihlpapier factory suddenly meant Dada. For three weeks various international artists staged daily very well- attended concerts, exhibitions, performances and theater
shows, while we frantically tried to convert the vast area into usable space. As our
capacities reached their limits, given the overwhelming amount of vacant multi-story
factory halls, we entrusted spaces to anyone with a sound idea of how to use them,
thus integrating new members into our collective. The vagrants who before our arrival
were spending winter months in hidden corners of the factory halls and were now
doing some cleaning and repair work, were the only people to receive a fixed hourly
wage out of the proceeds from the door.

Over the next four months, “Sihlcity now!“ remained the largest cultural squat in
Europe, and until our June of 2003 eviction it attracted tens of thousands of visitors
with its three concert halls, art museum, Croesus opera, Electric Cafe, Syntosil level
and roof garden, skating disco, Goa garden, Fleischkäs Medialab (“Meat Loaf media
laboratory”), robot foundry, subterranean ghost train, open-air stage, traveler site and
a bevy of open ateliers.

But by putting up with Dada squatters the city council made itself vulnerable to
blackmail from the Karl Steiner AG, which was planning to build on the factory site
a superfluous shopping mall branded Sihlcity. In a feature article in the daily “Tages-
Anzeiger,” referring to us as „Dada vandals,“ it was reported that the Karl Steiner AG
intended to charge the city half a million francs to cover the costs of waste disposal.
The pretext for this demand was graffiti and piles of rubbish, which allegedly accu-
mulated only during the last few months of the factory‘s fifteen-year vacancy. Some
of these same „defacements“ have since been preserved by Karl Steiner AG and are
flaunted in a prominent spot in the current glossy Credit Suisse advertisement leaflet
as an indication of the unique “bohemian flair“ of Sihlcity.

(Above: Dada-style fashion show with salvaged garments)