Project 012

Ponzi Scheme 
June 14 - 20, 2026
c/o Basel Social Club | Basel (Switzerland)

A durational performance by Bianca Millan, Samuel Fasse and Romain Sarrot, with costumes developed in exclusive collaboration with Coperni.

Supported by Domenico Positano

The work takes place in a vacant office building in Basel — a space of suspended productivity, stripped of its function. Into it, three artists introduce a set of archaic gestures: wood is sawn by hand, fennel is cut and slowly boiled into a decoction shared with the audience, a bench is built from scratch. Poems from Ismail Kadare's Anthology of Modern Albanian Poetry: An Elusive Eagle Soars are read aloud throughout — resistance and coded language running beneath the surface of physical labor.

The performance is structured around six stations and lasts four hours per session, repeated across three consecutive days. It has no linear narrative and no closed form. The audience moves through it freely, catching fragments — a saw cutting through wood, a pot coming to boil, a close-up of lips on a monitor filming another monitor. What accumulates is not a story but a density: the same gestures, charged by repetition, slowly becoming something more than themselves.

The Promethean undercurrent is deliberate but not illustrated. Producing fire, transferring it into a shared substance, building something by hand in a space not designed for it — these gestures carry the weight of transgression without naming it. The office building does not become a stage: it remains what it is, and that is precisely the friction the performance inhabits.

The costumes, developed in exclusive collaboration with Coperni, are integral to this logic. Semi-transparent, open-backed, worn over black leggings with wooden clogs that amplify the sound of each step — they oscillate between protective garment and second skin, between uniform and ritual vestment. A costume exchange protocol runs through the performance: at certain moments, the garments

circulate between performers, redistributing with them roles, positions and responsibilities across the stations. The one who takes on the costume assumes the action; the one without it becomes a carrier of equipment, a shifter of viewpoints. The community the work sketches is not fixed — it reconfigures itself continuously, according to rules that remain opaque to the audience.

A sound and video capture system operates as an active station in its own right: cameras connected to monitors render real-time fragments of the performance, while microphones displace sounds across the space via distant speakers, producing a desynchronized perceptual field in which image and sound collide without ever fully coinciding.

Photos by Joanna Wilk