Portraits Agnes Murmann and Nicole Brugger
“Swiss Post is buzzing around us every day like bees.”
Agnes Murmann and Nicole Brugger created a meeting space especially for Swiss Post in BaseCamp at the Locarno Film Festival. We asked the young artists what kind of encounters Swiss Post can still enable in the digital era.
Scenographer and product designer Agnes Murmann and Graphic designer Nicole Brugger work together to design and create spatial concepts for exhibitions and venues. They are fascinated by spaces where people meet – while you can plan and design these spaces, you can never tell how people will behave or feel when they are in them. As interior designers, they also want to encourage people to engage with their surroundings and actively help shape their spaces.
For the purposes of the project, you’ve taken a long, hard look at Swiss Post. Do you now see Swiss Post and the way it brings people together differently?
Agnes and Nicole: Swiss Post is buzzing around us every day like bees, without us consciously realizing it. Its letter boxes and vehicles are everywhere – they’re effectively part of the local landscape. Looking at Swiss Post also opened our eyes a little as to how omnipresent it actually is.
We went to the Härkingen letter center as part of our research and it made us realize for the first time just how many letters and parcels Swiss Post carries every day, and how closely connected the various locations are and have to be to ensure that letters can get to their destination overnight.
Why is the fact that art can bring people together important to you?
Art is a universal language that can convey emotions and ideas in a unique way. It can be a bridge that brings us into contact with each other – across language barriers and national borders. And art allows people from different backgrounds and perspectives to come together to share common experiences and enrich each other.
Beyond this commitment, what other messages do you want to convey with your projects? What do you want people to take away with them when they engage with your work?
We don’t see our space as a work, we see it much more as a set of tools – a toolkit. We want it to stimulate the BaseCamp artists to help shape the space themselves and make it their own. The idea behind the space is for it to be a platform provided by Swiss Post that allows visitors to meet each other. Together with the library in the space next door, we want to encourage people to exchange and discuss ideas and create new things. The inte-rior design makes Swiss Post’s commitment to art visible in various places.
About Nicole Brugger
Nicole Brugger did an apprenticeship as a polygrapher in Reiden in the canton of Lucerne. She has lived in the city of Lucerne for around nine years, where, after completing her preliminary course, she studied graphic de-sign at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Now a freelance graphic designer, Nicole Brugger is working on a number of projects in the cultural sphere, always trying to tell new visual stories with her artwork. But walks in the forest are just as much a part of her work as her compositions. Nicole Brugger has an eye for what others tend to overlook – with one example being the Bork project, which examines the markings hidden under the bark of dead wood. Precise and analytical, her works often straddle the border between graphics and art, subtext and observation.
About Agnes Murmann
Agnes Murmann is a product designer and scenographer. She studied product design at the Ecole d'Art in Lau-sanne. She has lived in Basel since 2022, where she works independently. As a product designer, she is currently working on a product design with the integrative workshop St. Jakob in Zurich – a project supported by Pro Helvetia. Agnes Murmann is fascinated by the city as a living space, and an exploration of the public sphere is a central part of her work. For example, she developed a project to “beautify” the Globus construction site in Ba-sel’s market square together with the design studio ZMIK, and she designed one of the installations for the Lausanne Jardins 24 cultural event.