Heinz Nigg


Heinz Nigg is a Swiss anthropologist, community artist, and promoter of participatory video. In 1980 he documented the outbreak of the youth riots in Zurich.

Life

Nigg, citizen from Maienfeld and Zurich, grew up with two siblings in Zurich, Switzerland. His parents come from a working-class family and a farmer's family in Maienfeld, Canton of Grisons. His mother was a housewife and dressmaker, whilst his father worked for a non-profit housing association.
In 1967/68 Nigg spent one year as an exchange student in the US, where he was inspired by the artistic expression and politics of the Counterculture of the 60s – the Hippies and Yippies. From 1969 to 1976 he studied history, political science, and social anthropology at Zurich University. At this time he was also an activist in the youth movement and in the rebellious local art scene. During this period he wrote articles about exhibitions of Minimal and Conceptual art for the Tages-Anzeiger, and for the Kunstnachrichten, a journal of international . In 1974, he traveled to New York as assistant of :de:Johannes_Gachnang|Johannes Gachnang, director of the Kunsthalle Bern. There he met the artist On Kawara and received a series of postcards from his project I Got Up. In 1975 Nigg collaborated with Izi Fiszman on the international art event Salto Arte in Brussels.
From 1976 to 1979 Nigg lived in London where he did ethnographic fieldwork on the use of audiovisual tools in Community action and Community organizing, which was published as his dissertation in 1980 in Zurich. The book was widely distributed and discussed in the UK:
What Nigg and Wade's research indicates is that video is a medium of rich potential, that is just waiting to be released. They make it clear that were professionals and amateurs have become dedicated to introducing some control over the usually authoritarian medium of TV, and where the monopoly of that resource can be broken down, spirited initiatives are possible. Community Media implies that low-gauge video is far from being just a toy invented to enable the nuclear family better use of programmed TV schedules.
From 1979 to 1980 Nigg was a lecturer at the Ethnologisches Seminar of Zurich University. Because of a controversial video documentation about the Zurich youth movement and the Opera-House Riots he was banned from teaching at the university. This case of censorship led to a wave of international solidarity with Dr. Nigg and Prof. Lorenz G. Loeffler, head of the department. Jonathan Benthall, director of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in London:
Dr. Nigg was required to leave the seminar and is no longer, at any rate for the time being, in academic life. What are the main issues? It is implied in some press accounts of the affair that Professor Loeffler is considered to be a political subversive; but as far as I know there is no evidence to support such a charge. He is a serious and distinguished scholar. He gives every impression of being a liberal and a relativist. Nigg's view of the ethics of social research is that the anthropologist's findings should be shared at all stages with the subjects of his research, and that he should identify with their cause if he thinks it a just one. Loeffler agrees with Nigg that the seminar should be free to support the interests of underprivileged groups, even at the expense of scientific purity which he considers to be a fiction.
Since 1980 Nigg has been active as a visual anthropologist and community artist. His fields of interest are social movements, participation in urban development, and the documentation of migration and mobility. In 2017 he curated Rebel Video for the Swiss National Museum, an exhibition about the alternative video movements of the 1970s and 1980s in Switzerland and the UK. He mostly works with portraits, based on the methods of Oral History, and he also maintains his involvement in art and photography projects.
Heinz Nigg is father of a son and lives in Zurich, Switzerland.

Publications

In English

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