Art Ghost Train

by Rebecca Moss and Augustin Rebetez

To celebrate the 100th birthday of Jean Tinguely, who died in 1991 at the age of 66, Museum Tinguely is planning a new, challenging art project. In summer 2025, a ghost train designed by the English artist Rebecca Moss (*1991) and the Swiss artist Augustin Rebetez (*1986) will be set up in Solitude Park in front of the museum. It takes visitors on a 3-minute journey through an immersive art landscape. This is a reference to the large-scale installation Crocrodrome de Zig et Puce, equipped with a ghost train, which Tinguely created in 1977 together with other artists for the opening of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Rebecca Moss lives and works in London and Essex. The young, up-and-coming artist uses humor and a penchant for the absurd to create installative arrangements in which she primarily places herself in precarious situations. For her slapstick and experimental arrangements, she makes use of everyday mpopular materials and images, which she activates in an inventive but often banal way. Her penchant for improvisation invites chance to collaborate. We enjoy watching this playful failure and recognize ourselves in our everyday, futile striving - a striving that we encounter as well in Tinguely's useless poetry-producing machine sculptures. Augustin Rebetez lives and works in Mervelier. He is one of the most important and independent Swiss artists of his generation. His Maison Totale in Bôle has been open to visitors since summer 2024. It is a total work of art in which his fantastic visual worlds, creatures, totems, punk videos, music, dance, theater and interactive installations invite visitors on a walk-in tour. In 2016, he was a guest at the Museum Tinguely in the exhibition Prière de toucher with a large-format, walk-in installation that invited visitors to participate.

Moss and Rebetez will set up a course for the Tinguely ghost train, which will consist of both their own and joint creations.

For the opening of the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1977, Jean Tinguely, together with Bernhard Luginbühl, Daniel Spoerri and Niki de Saint Phalle, created the Crocrodrome de Zig et Puce, a huge, walk-in sculpture for the large entrance hall with a specially designed ghost train, rods and wheels, a marble run, illuminated lettering, a 'Musée Sentimental' and a crocodile leg completely covered in chocolate. To mark the anniversary, Museum Tinguely is reviving this event and initiating the temporary artistic transformation of an existing ghost train, the Wiener Prater Geisterbahn, built in 1935. It was a guest at the Basel Autumn Fair for many years and has provided a special thrill for generations of passengers young and old.

The art ghost train will be in operation in Solitude Park in front of the Museum Tinguely from 22 May 22 (Tinguely's birthday) to 30 August (the anniversary of his death) in 2025.