«You can’t escape the sound» — Interview with the winning team

The team behind «unfolded minute»: Franziska Schürch & Isabel Koellreuter (project lead/history), Jannik Giger (composition/visual art), Rahel Zaugg (visual art), and Andrea Steegmueller (ASA + SAGA GmbH, architecture), interviewed by Laura Alt. Salomé Gutscher of ASA + SAGA is also part of the team.

Congratulations on winning the competition for the memorial site in Bern! How did you find out about the jury’s decision, and what was your first reaction?

FS: A friend texted me in the morning: “Dear Franziska, congratulations, how cool!” I checked, then wrote to my fellow team members: “We won!”

RZ: At first, I didn’t believe it.

AS: We were delighted.

You’re a team spanning history, art and architecture. How did this interdisciplinary collaboration work in practice?

FS: Very democratically. We brought ideas to many meetings, then went back to our own studios with “homework,” applied our respective expertise to it, and brought it all back together.

RZ: We also developed a lot of ideas together, with the different disciplines becoming interlinked. Personally, I found the hardest part was this: we had a mountain of ideas and had to reduce it to a small hill — a truly fascinating process.

AS: At the start, we went to look at the site together, where the Memorial will be built. The first sketches of ideas emerged on site, on the Casinoterrasse.

The jury describes «unfolded minute» as “assertive” and “present-day.” Would you agree?

AS: We actually see our contribution as fairly restrained. We tried to create something with enough presence to support the site, without overburdening it.

JG: It’s meant to become an active memorial site — a place where movement and encounter happen. Sound as a medium and the idea of the forum are key to that. We wanted people to be able to come together and take part. In a city, you listen very selectively — there are church bells, traffic, and much of it gets tuned out. Bells are also a sound installation: they stand for regularity, for something that repeats and paces everyday life. We tried to shift that concept — the sound wall never repeats the same sequence twice, and it’s unpredictable when it will sound. That’s a counter-concept, running against how we’re used to listening — you could certainly call that assertive.

IK: You can’t escape the sound. With a monument, you can look away, but when you walk through the sound, you can hardly cover your ears — we liked that. We’re also creating spots on the terrace where encounters happen in the here and now.

What does it mean to you to convey remembrance in a sensory, atmospheric way?

AS: The good thing about our intervention, about the sound, is that it truly reaches everyone. We wanted to address all people, and even, for example, blind or deaf people can perceive the installation. You can hear the wall, feel it, sense its vibrations. It mattered to us that the memorial site be perceptible to young and old alike, to people with and without disabilities.

IK: We also wanted to create a space suited to engaging children. It needed to speak a universally understandable language — this artwork was meant to be simple and independent of language, so that people could engage with it without needing it explained to them.

Was it a challenge to translate themes such as National Socialism, its victims, and Switzerland’s role into a form as reduced and abstract as sound?

IK: The sound sequences are dedicated to the victims of National Socialism. The idea was to build on the “minute of silence” and to remember people — not primarily as victims, but as the fact that they were individuals. We commemorate without personalising, but by honouring each individual life and its uniqueness.

The sound wall is set to play a one-minute sequence three times an hour. How did you arrive at this rhythm, this length, and the content dimension of the sound sequences?

JG: It mattered to us that it wasn’t just about the sounding minutes, but also about the silence in between. We also wanted to work against the kind of pacing we know from church bells. Three times an hour felt right: the Casinoterrasse isn’t a museum, but a public space with restaurants and residents who want to sleep — we’re mindful of that. It was important to us to have a certain irregularity, without people standing in front of the wall for four hours with nothing happening. Even though nothing ever happens the same way twice, the minutes are connected to one another — like a chain, like people holding hands. The melody ends and essentially begins again where it left off. In music, that’s called a “crossfade.” The pauses are, in a sense, the reverse of the minute of silence — silence that nonetheless acts like a reverberation or an anticipatory echo. So the installation is actually always running, because the pauses are part of it.

Alongside the sound wall, the memorial site also includes a round forum with benches. LED text is meant to appear inside this forum. What exactly will it say?

IK: Inspired by Max Frisch’s “Fragebogen” (Questionnaire), we pose questions about human rights. These are meant to appear inside the forum. They are simple questions, but ones that really require you to look inward.

RZ: When you sit together in this circle, you have someone opposite you, and a question hovers above that person. The aim is to start a conversation about these questions, perhaps even with people you don’t know at all. Conversations are the foundation of democracy. That absolutely needs support today.

So far we’ve discussed two parts of the installation; a third completes it: electronic screens. What kind of access do they offer, and how do they relate to the sound wall and the forum?

AS: The three parts aren’t simply placed side by side — they belong together. We deliberately positioned them so that the installation can be perceived subtly, but also seen. Through the material — we chose rolled steel, which fits into the context in both colour and materiality — everything is framed together, so that you immediately notice: this belongs together, this is part of this installation. Even when you’re just passing by, coming from the direction of the bridge or the city.

IK: Each sound sequence is meant to be dedicated to a life, and we wanted to make these life stories visible. A story needs to be given context to become understandable. Short biographies are meant to appear on the screens: you should be able to read names, hear stories — about who took a stand, who used the room for manoeuvre they had, who was turned away. The aim is to remember and to engage with the complexity of history during the Nazi era and with the role played by Swiss people. There’s also a link to the network, to a website where these biographies will be presented in greater depth. We want history to become tangible, not only on a sensory level but also on an intellectual one.

On the subject of the network: as part of the Memorial project, the memorial site in Bern is closely linked to the planned “Vermittlungszentrum Flucht” (Flight Interpretation Centre) in Diepoldsau (SG), and is meant to become part of a wider network of remembrance in Switzerland. What does this embedding mean to you?

IK: We saw it as a great opportunity that this network and the supporting association exist, with people practically standing by, ready to programme the screens and coordinate mediation between the different sites. For the Memorial, it’s important that it be curated, and that there are people to take that on for the long term. We don’t yet know exactly what lies ahead of us, but we’re looking forward to the collaboration.

You also proposed printing receipts from nearby restaurants, parking garages, cafés and so on in Bern with something linked to the Memorial — such as a question about human rights. That’s an unusually low-threshold approach. How did you come up with this idea?

RZ: The idea came up early on and then connected with the questions planned for the forum. I find these questions essential to the project — including the fact that they’re not only posed on site, but carried further afield. A medium people always end up taking with them by accident in everyday life is, precisely, receipts.

IK: Rahel Zaugg grasped that immediately. When we were on site in Bern, she started collecting these slips — she went to the car park and saw that such slips exist everywhere: tram tickets, parking tickets, coffee receipts.

RZ: It’s a medium that already exists, one you can draw on very easily to carry these questions further.

IK: And you have to involve people to get them on board — the bar owner, the transport companies, and so on. That takes a lot of conversations, and people need to be brought along. It also has a multiplier effect, which we’re definitely interested in.

One could of course object that such an everyday format as a receipt or a parking ticket undermines the seriousness of the subject. How do you deal with that risk?

RZ: I don’t think a question that reaches you by chance and unexpectedly becomes any less serious as a result. Sure, you can avoid it, throw the slip away, simply not look — but, to come back to the Memorial, that’s precisely a role Switzerland partly played at the time of National Socialism. It’s about the moment when you think: why is that written there? That’s where the questioning begins.

AS: I also think that not confining yourself to the memorial site, but trying to carry the subject further, underscores its seriousness. It’s about leaving traces.

You’ve already touched on this — many people pass by the Casinoterrasse in their everyday lives. What do you hope people will feel when, in future, they walk across the Casinoterrasse and hear the sound wall?

IK: We hope they’ll pause for a moment and linger, that they’ll be struck with wonder, that they’ll reflect. We’d find it wonderful if many encounters took place there, and if people exposed themselves to the sound but then reflected on the present: what does this have to do with my life?

AS: Tourists from all over might come too, and that would be lovely. But it’s also about the subjective moments of Bern’s residents: cycling past, or deliberately walking slowly past it for a minute. You carry something with you into the day, or into your next conversation.

Thank you very much for the interview.

The interview took place on 2 September 2026.