NEXUS Collective
Transdisciplinary Art & Conscious Practices
The NEXUS Collective (1) was founded in 2024 out of a shared desire to create and a drive to rethink social structures. We explore how collaborative creative processes can help challenge existing norms and envision and communicate new, alternative realities. We experience the dominant conception of reality as overwhelming and exploitative.
The aim of the NEXUS Collective is to provide an open platform for young creatives from diverse disciplines to connect and learn from one another. Through transdisciplinary collaboration, both on individual projects and long-term initiatives, a wide variety of projects can emerge. As a collective, we continuously learn and evolve through our exchange with each other.
This website is developing organically into a living archive and a space for sharing ideas and creative impulses. With a transdisciplinary and holistic approach, it seeks to provide diverse insights into key cultural, social, and ecological issues of our time, and to spark unexpected connections between topics, ideas, and practices.
Basel/Zurich 2024
(1) Nexus comes from Latin and means: connection, link, intertwining, to bind together, network.
In September: Atelier NEXUS, Jurastrasse 5, 4053 Basel CHLearning from eachother
Worlding
The NEXUS Collective does not view education as the one-sided transmission of knowledge, but rather as a shared process of engagement, inquiry, and learning. Our understanding of education is based on the conviction that knowledge cannot be viewed as the fixed possession of individuals, but rather emerges through the exchange of diverse perspectives, experiences, and practices. This gives rise to a responsibility to create spaces that enable critical reflection, collaborative exploration, and the development of new perspectives. Our projects are conceived as open spaces for learning and experience, in which all participants—regardless of their role, background, or expertise—actively contribute to the creation of meaning and knowledge.
Here, Art serves as a space for education and reflection where existing perspectives can be questioned, new connections established, and transformative ideas explored.
The understanding of art that guides the NEXUS Collective is not based exclusively on classical visual art, but rather on a broader concept of creating. We understand creative work as a practice of “worlding”: the active co-creation of realities, relationships, and forms of coexistence. The starting point for this is the assumption that every world is based on specific meanings, practices, and relationships that are continually produced and stabilized through everyday actions. Worlds are thus not fixed or natural givens, but rather malleable structures that determine what appears possible, conceivable, and livable.
In this sense, we understand design not merely as the creation of objects or aesthetic forms, but as a cultural and social practice. Our work therefore moves between artistic, social, and design practices. It explores how new forms of coexistence can emerge, be tested, and become anchored in everyday life. In this process, design becomes a method for questioning existing realities and opening up new livable possibilities.
Food as a creative disciplineFood plays a central role in this context. Like other creative disciplines, working with food serves to create meaning and shape worlds. Through taste, form, color, and context, food conveys cultural values, tells stories, and reflects social structures and rituals. We therefore understand food not merely as a consumer good, but as a creative medium that actively participates in shaping our environment and our bodies. Working with food thus opens up a concrete approach to questions of care, sustainability, community, and transformation, and becomes for us a practice of collectively shaping the world.
Also see
Dynamic strtcuresThe NEXUS Collective is a vibrant, constantly evolving collective. We regularly review and adapt our goals and practices to keep pace with current challenges and the changing needs of our members. We create an environment that responds to dynamic changes in resources and structures and enables members to express their creativity and continue to grow.