Global Town Baden – portraits from an urban region in Switzerland
Exhibition, book, and discussion forum. Baden 2008 – 2011.

From September 2010 to January 2011 the local Museum of Baden will present Global Town Baden, an exhibition on migration and globalization. The core of the exhibition are 30 video portraits of people living in Baden Town and its surrounding area. Some of them are migrants who talk about the countries they come from, how they adapted to living in Baden and how they participate in Baden’s social life. This section of the exhibition also includes internal migrants from other regions in Switzerland.

Other video portraits show senior citizens from Baden who were born there and were in regular contact with people from many countries: a hotelier in the old spa quarter of Baden who accommodated guests from abroad, a start-up engineer and an installer who worked for Brown, Boveri & Cie, the former Swiss electronic trust (now ABB), all over the world. Artists and business people from Baden with international contacts talk about what globalization means to them.

The national and cultural identities of the people in the video portraits are diverse indeed: Youngsters from Kosovo who have arrived in Baden only recently, older migrants from Italy and other European countries who were part of the wave of immigration in Baden of the sixties and seventies, as well as highly qualified expats from European, Anglo-Saxon, and Asian countries who work for international companies in the Baden area.

A book publication accompanies the exhibition. During the exhibition a number of forum discussions will take place. Their focus will be on how immigrants participate in the social, cultural, and political life in the Baden area: Should they have more political rights on the communal and cantonal level? The forum discussions are organised in conjunction with the Fachstelle Integration of the City of Baden.

Projectcoordination: Barbara Welter, director of the History Museum Baden
Idea, concept, and realisation: Heinz Nigg, cultural anthropologist and community artist
Forum discussions: Natalie Ammann, head of the Fachstelle Integration of the City of Baden

This project is supported by the Canton of Aargau and the Federal Office for Migration.