For Art Basel 2026, Zurich-based interdisciplinary studio Altherr/Weiss presents a new site-specific, sculptural intervention at druckwerk, Basel's celebrated printmaking studio. The printshop houses a collection of monumental cast iron printing presses and is housed in the iconic Wartek Brewery building. The installation returns Wartek to the satellite exhibition circuit during Art Basel Week.

Drawing on the Futurist tradition of chronophotography—from Giacomo Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) to the optical film experiments of Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren—Altherr/Weiss visualise the circulation of paper through the studio's cast iron letterpress machines, translating motion into three-dimensional form. Paper becomes sculpture: voluminous, cloud-like, suspended in time. Where the machines are heavy and immovable, the paper is amplified into something airy, fragile and accumulative.

The machines at druckwerk represent a generation of knowledge at risk of disappearing in an increasingly digitized world. The installation's billowing paper forms also speak to a broader paradox: the shapes we associate with digital immateriality, clouds, data, and the weightless promise of the internet are, in reality, sustained by physical infrastructure of enormous environmental cost. Paper, cast iron, and human hands offer a different kind of weight.