Next year’s edition of Manifesta, titled “What People Do For Money: Some Joint Ventures,” will be hosted in Zurich and for the first time will be curated by an artist, Christian Jankowski. It will feature thirty-five new commissions unfolding throughout the city over the course of one hundred days starting next June.

Discussing his historic role in Manifesta for an interview with Lauren Cavalli for Artforum.com, Jankowski said that he had wondered, “What can I offer as an artist and what can I also offer as a curator? I cannot now be a different person once I put on the hat of the curator. Where do you start?”

The city’s commercial side may be one such starting point for Jankowski’s biennial. “Zurich is a financial city center,” he said. “It is very dominant, when you look you see all of the banks and the presence of capitalism in Switzerland.”

According to Cavalli, Jankowski envisioned the history and people of the city as playing a pivotal role in the exhibition: “Why not invite all artists and give them the complete list of all professions in Zurich and they could choose one profession and with this profession try to find one host who is interested in art, interested in collaborating with an artist, and is not afraid of a certain amount of audience?” (For example, one Manifesta artist, John Arnold, will collaborate with his host—the Michelin-starred chef Fabian Spiquel—to recreate dishes served at state banquets, at snack bars where official embassies’ employees will interact with diners.)

Jankowski added, “When the artists come to town they are welcomed by their host, and the hosts shows them his working space, his colleagues, and this is used as a starting point for trying to inspire the artists. The notion of who is an artist is quite open.”

The ongoing evolution of works throughout the biennial will also be a pivotal element of this Manifesta, as epitomized by Jankowski’s idea for a pavilion space—the so-called Pavilion of Reflections—consisting of a spectator stand, a swimming pool with bar, and an LED screen that will project footage of artists at work throughout the city: “I thought the process that happens on the way to the final artwork is something I want to make visible to the audience.”