Julieta Schildknecht
During Art Basel in June and July, when the city’s impressive and widely admired cultural machinery operates at full intensity — between previews, aperos, openings, fairs, and the social acceleration of Art Basel Social Club — the off-space Heubergfenster proposes another temporality. Located in a former Kaminfeger home in the old town of traditional Basel, the space remains permanently visible from the street and open at any hour of the day. It functions less as a conventional exhibition venue than as a vitrine showcased between public exposure and quiet resistance.
The project brings together two of my works produced across different moments in time. The first, Stone Valley, developed between 2006 and 2016 using outdated film and a Lomo camera, presents a utopic landscape repeatedly exposed until the negative enters into dialogue with the positive. Mountains dissolve into turquoise light leaks, stone valleys become unstable psychological terrains, and memory appears fragmented, layered, and chemically altered. Printed on machine-made cotton paper traditionally associated with photography, the work oscillates between industrial reproducibility and analogue unpredictability.
In contrast, a second work, W0W, produced in 2026 consists of a dynamic charcoal drawing on artesanal handmade cotton paper: a continuous line without beginning nor end. Precise rather than fragile, the gesture unfolds through rhythm, control, and movement, transforming drawing into a form of spatial thought oscillating between landscape, architecture, political border, and notation.
Together, the works engage with landscape not as geography, but as a philosophical and political space suspended between memory and projection, materiality and authorship.
The permanent visibility of Heubergfenster inevitably recalls the theatrical distance of How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare by Joseph Beuys, in which the audience observed the artist and the dead hare largely from outside the gallery window. Similarly, Heubergfenster exists in a state between display and withdrawal: continuously accessible to the public gaze while remaining detached from the performative rituals of the art fair economy surrounding it.
