ooo is a digital platform for art and culture that emerged in 2022 from an initiative of cultural practitioners and artists. Through a changing pool of artists, writers and journalists from the field of art and beyond, ooo reflects and presents artworks, exhibitions and events through diverse approaches and forms of expression.

Mayday farewell

Q.U.I.C.H.E.

If your mobile phone was already flirting with the German mobile phone network at a dangerously high frequency, then you were probably at Mayday for an exhibition. The off-space located on Ostquasi - which has been complemented for the last year and a half by the neighbouring space Signal - closed its doors in March with a roaring party. When visiting Mayday, it was always exciting to see how the invited artists would react to the dominant rusty-red tiled floor of the former workers' changing room. This exciting anticipation was somehow inherent to Mayday. Again and again, one wondered what would happen there in the ether of the three-country air. For example, when the Mayday team invited the artists Nils Amadeus Lange and Mario Espinoza to show a performance entitled "watersports" as an event to accompany Toni Schmale's exhibition, you could hardly stand the suspense of wondering whether the two would take this as an opportunity to artfully pee on themselves or the room.
The closing party programme that Eva-Maria Knüsel and Camillo Paravicini had put together with Jasper Mehler and Ruben Stauffer was similarly exciting. The list of names was already impressive with Sophie Jung, Sabrina Röthlisberger Belkacem & Vani Adjoubei and Floris Maniscalco. But it was particularly exciting to see what Mykki Blanco, the current Basel resident of choice, would have to offer the audience that had flocked to see him. Mykki appeared with a green-painted face and grey wig as the character "Christoph Merian Strasse". Over the course of just under an hour, the rapper* and artist* unleashed a firework display of eclectic moments. There were French omelettes, complaints about the quality of healthcare for queer people, shouts of Viva Palestina, musical interludes and then finally even an audience tattoo with a "Fist my Hole" tattoo (temporary). After Blanko had raffled off a giant chocolate Easter bunny and read out private text messages, Blanko opened the briefcase he had brought with him for the grand finale and enthusiastically threw 90s gay porn postcards into the already rather befuddled audience. I don't want to confess at this point how many of these wonderful cultural artefacts I picked up from the sticky Ostquai floor. Perhaps I will draw Father Christmas beards on the unintentionally comically arranged piles of muscles on these postcards over the course of the year and send them out as Christmas cards at the end of the year. That way, these pictures can remain in circulation. I just hope that, if the worst comes to the worst, my aunts and uncles can experience the same overload in the tasteful and moral grey area that I experienced during Mykki's performance.