I REMEMBER WANDERING DOWN Zurich’s Bahnhofstraße late at night some years ago and thinking that if this was one of the most secure streets I’d ever been on, it was also possibly the most sinister. The flagship private banks interspersed among the avenue’s luxury boutiques looked like Olympian mausoleums. They were groomed, still, and fortified, better rooted into the foundations of neoliberal society than the governments that purportedly regulated them.

Zurich, the site of this year’s Manifesta, is something of a departure from the exhibition’s previous farther-flung host cities, whose hybridity