Artène

Franck Areal, Horburgstrasse 103, 4057 Basel (Switzerland)

Franck Areal used to be a coffee factory — the Franck brand, chicory and malt coffee substitutes, a name that’s been on Swiss shelves for over a century. For six days during Art Basel week, the old industrial site turns into something else entirely: music, fashion, food, performance, all built around a different idea of what the fair week could be. I went on the closing night, Saturday, when everything the week had been building toward was happening at once.

0xCollection had taken over the silos with three installations under the title Cosmic Knots. The collection itself is only a few years old — founded in 2023, Basel-based, built around digital and time-based media art, moving each year through a different curatorial theme — and the first piece asked me to lie down. X — Kinetic Techno Sculpture, by Gábor Kitzinger, András László Nagy and Rozi Mákó, runs on a sensor that reads your heartbeat and breathing the moment you settle onto the lounger, feeding that data straight into suspended LEDs, a ring of robotic lights, strobes and a soundscape built live around you. Lying there, watching lights respond to something as involuntary as my own pulse, was unsettling in a way I hadn’t expected from something so simple in premise.

Kurt Hentschläger’s SUB was the one that stayed with me longest. The room is dark in a way that doesn’t ease — no shapes resolving, no adjusting — and you find your way by touching the walls, hands out, feeling for the middle. Every so often a hand would land on someone instead of a wall, and both of us would pull back before finding our way again. It was hot inside, humid in a way that made the whole thing feel closer to a body than a room, and the heat that week outside had been brutal to begin with. Then the flashes started, and everyone went still. I lifted a hand in front of my face and, for a fraction of a second between flashes, I could see its shape hanging there — gone again before I could be sure I’d really seen it.

Valerie Reding’s MONSTERS held a quieter room nearby — fourteen staged portraits of people who’d survived abuse in close relationships, each reimagined as a kind of surreal superhero.

At seven, I caught Resonant Bodies, a performance with Mila Comel, Lia Sauser and Hannah Kühni, staged in the same room as Goodbyes, a wall-mounted kinetic piece by an artist going by kinetischeschaos — its label calling it a tribute to nature’s beauty and permanence alongside the transience of being. The dancers moved through that room with flashlights in hand, singing as they went, the beams cutting across each other and across the crowd watching them.

Dinner came from Restaurant Magdalena, cooked fresh in a professional kitchen built specifically for the festival, set up in the courtyard alongside the bar — chef Dominik Hartmann, two Michelin stars and a Michelin Green Star to his name, since named Gault Millau’s Cook of the Year. It was the best thing I ate all week. A small dance floor opened straight off that same courtyard, its own electro set running underneath the rest of the night, a low current pulling people in and out between courses.

Outside, projections by Niklaus Oppliger ran across the building’s facade, the old brick catching color it was never built to hold. And in a separate room — carpeted, lit entirely in red — people were lying down on the floor, shoes off, each handed a small paper cup of tomato juice extract on the way in. I drank mine in one go, cold and refreshing after the heat of the night, then walked the room barefoot, threading between a hanging structure of lights overhead — Ado & Comenius, I’d later learn, were behind it — the carpet soft under my feet and the courtyard’s bass still reaching me through the wall, faint but never quite gone.

Artène visited OMG, Franck! , 20 June 2026. All photography by Elasse.

OMG, Franck! took place from 15 to 20 June during Art Basel week