Stefan Banz's 'The Island' at La Plage: A Play on Scale and Context

Stefan Banz's exhibition 'The Island' at La Plage in Neuchâtel (August 17 – September 22, 2002) features oversized women's belongings—a bag, dress, underwear, sunglasses—scattered on pristine sand inside a basement gallery. The installation plays on the gallery's name (La Plage, meaning 'the beach') and its address at 46 rue des Sablons ('sand street'). Banz's work often explores dual perspectives, as he stated in a self-interview for his 1998 exhibition 'Echoes' at Kriens prison. His earlier project 'Physis en différance' (1992) involved cultivating a vegetable garden inside Kunsthalle Luzern with Harald Szeemann and Jacques Derrida. Banz recontextualizes contemporary art tropes, here using scale shifts to alter reception, referencing Swift's Gulliver (as in his 2000 work 'Gulliver' at Migros Museum). The installation's absurdity—a beach in a cellar—echoes Rimbaud's 'un salon au fond d'un lac.' The exhibition coincides with Expo.02, whose sites were called 'arteplages' (Swiss German pun 'harte Plage' meaning 'hard scourge'), suggesting the giant woman represents a disappearing homeland, underscored by Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue's 'Where the Wild Roses Grow.'