Fragment of 'Art Basel Scenography' at Swiss Design Awards 2026

‘Art Basel Scenography’ experiments with different strategies of reuse and the ready-made. The approach responds to each event’s temporality through responsible sourcing of materials, considering options available outside of the architecture industry. In 2023, when we began working on this system a question came: How can we minimise production? How can we avoid more waste? The idea of reusing and recirculating material has guided our design vision forward. The fair’s extensive inventory of built elements, as well as the aluminum manufacturing industry, has become a repository of materials to borrow, transform, and reuse.
 

Thus far, we have produced stand-alone furniture pieces, such as benches and counters, from aluminum offcuts. We also negotiated and repurposed architectural elements anchoring shelving, display and seating to existing wall structures. Our questions remain, yet in this ongoing quest for materials and solutions, we’re enabling a site-specific methodology for temporary events, potentially adaptable to various contexts, each time with a new script.