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.
Symbiosis is an artistic-research space that explores contemporary forms of living together from queer, feminist, and speculative perspectives. At its core, symbiosis is understood as an interplay of connection, autonomy, and exchange.
The project aims to open perspectives beyond the human-centered worldview that dominates Western Europe, proposing a more holistic understanding of life and the world. Central to this approach are forms of collaborative interaction: interspecies cooperation, symbiotic alliances, collectively shared resources beyond monetary logic, decentralized structures, bottom-up practices, and mutual dependencies.
Ongoing planetary crises challenge us to rethink and reweave our relationships with the more-than-human world. Symbiosis thus becomes more than a metaphor—it becomes a practical model for thinking and acting, a space where new ways of being, working, and sharing can be explored and imagined.
Our shared week focused primarily on negotiating between individual and collective needs and processes. This experience was particularly important for our collective and for how we want to work, especially in a larger group. Within the group, there was a shared interest in exploring and fostering a culture of care as a counter-narrative to prevailing work conditions in art and culture.
The collective is grateful to all participants who shared this time and experience with us, for all the contributions and wonderful projects. We look forward to the shared outcomes.
Stéphanie Binet, Catherine Claessen, Ilia La Belle, Zoe Loureiro, Josefa Lüscher, Manuerl, Mira Mercan, Paola Nol, Lara Odermatt, Fabienne Schoch, Micha Schweizer, Manu Süsstrunk, Nina Šikić