Petting Zoo by Mathias Toubro and Agatha Wara

During the 1990s, Dutch cities started building petting zoos in many neighborhoods so that urban children could interact with animals. For any of these city kids petting zoos was the first time they could see or touch a wild (though docile) animal. They could pet it, feed it, depending on the animal they could ride it. They could even take home a little bit of e-coli if they were particularly unlucky.

We find this idea of the petting zoo very fun and something that could work with the nature/farm environment of Bruderholz. Our idea is to make a 2-person show that is a play between the petting zoo and an art show by showing goat-shaped paintings (Mathias) and dragged-out alpaca sculptures (Agatha), in an enclosure somewhere on the outdoor sites of Basel Social Club.

If you ever go to the countryside you don’t drink organic coffee you drink beer and do the honky tonk and you get in a fight. Bruderholz Farms is not exactly nature. Between the bowling alley and the flower garden, your biggest threat is perhaps getting stung by a bee.

On petting—
Petting is cute but it’s also dark. Cute things make us angry (“cuteness aggression” is biological - look it up). Petting also comes in degrees - light, medium, and heavy petting is especially necessary during the teenage wasteland years. A (heavy) petting zoo by the WATER TOWER BRUDERHOLZ, that’s how they do it in the countryside.