Over a hundred years ago, in a city that was pretending the war wasn't happening, a handful of people decided not to pretend. Zürich, 1916. Ball, Hennings, Tzara, Höch, Duchamp — no appetite for war propaganda, no patience for the false note. They made noise instead. They separated nothing: thinking from feeling, body from voice, the absurd from the urgent.
That lineage is not what I inherited as decoration. It is what I use.
Not Dada as art history. Not Dada as archive. Dada as contraband — smuggled into rooms that would have thrown it out at the door.
The Kunstbewegung did its work in 1916. I do mine in boardrooms, brand labs, and the messy interior of organizations that have forgotten how to be surprised by themselves.
As the refusal to let the serious surface be the only surface. As the insistence that self-irony is not a luxury but a survival skill. As the knowledge — carried in the body, not the head — that the most rigid structure contains, somewhere, a hinge.
In times of turmoil, most interventions do one of two things: they confront without warmth, or they comfort without edge. Both leave the mess intact. What Dada offers is neither confrontation nor comfort. It offers a different relationship to the mess itself — one that stays through the aftertaste.
If any of this sounds like your kind of trouble — let's find out what Dada does when it has a deadline, a difficult room, and something real at stake.
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