Mats Staub
Mats Staub (born 1972, Muri near Berne, Switzerland) is a Swiss artist. He lives and works in Berlin as well as wherever his long-term projects take him. His projects have been presented all over the world, including Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt, Kaserne Basel, Theaterhaus Gessnerallee Zurich, Théâtre de Vidy Lausanne, The Berne Museum of Communication, the Theaterformen Festival in Hannover/Braunschweig, the Wiener Festwochen, the Adelaide Festival, the Bienal de Arte Mediales in Santiago de Chile and the South African International Documentary Festival Encounters in Cape Town. Biography. Mats Staub studied theatre, journalism and religious studies in Berne , Fribourg and Berlin. He worked as a dramaturg at Theater Neumarkt in Zurich (2002–2004), before beginning to create his own artistic projects which critics have situated between theatre and exhibition, research, journalism and literature. Staub's work is concerned with memory, life stories and far-reaching biographical experiences. They invite the participants to reflect on their pasts and to formulate these reflections and memories from a specific perspective - be it with a number ("Holidays"), in interviews with Staub himself ("My Grandparents, 21 - Memories of Growing Up"), in conversation with a partner ("Death and Birth In My Life"), or in writing  ("Ten Important Events In My Life/ Diez moments en mi vida"). His projects have led Staub to make interviews and recordings all around the world. For his audio installation "My Grandparents" (2008-2013) he talked to over three hundred people in fourteen cities about what they remember about their grandparents. In the video installation "21 – Memories of Growing Up" he has portrayed members of different generations in the process of remembering the time when they were 21 years old. His online collection "Ten Important Events In My Life", comprising around 3000 events, was also published as a book (Salis Verlag , 2014) and was continued as a site-specific as well as museum exhibition in Spain and Latin America as "Diez moments en mi vida" (2017-2019). Staub continuously expands his long-term projects by making new lists, portraits, conversations wherever one of his installations is presented. Thus, every project constitutes a growing archive of conversations and oral history from different countries, in different languages, often spanning several generations. Staub has worked with different formats: besides his audio and video installations with online collections ("Ten Important Events In My Life"), books, site-specific audio walks ("Bundesplatz" and "Metzgergasse") as well as  exhibitions in museums and in public space ("Diez momentos en mi vida"). His projects have been invited to festivals such as the Wiener Festwochen (2006, 2009, 2015), the Adelaide Festival (2018) and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (2019).