Desire for Transmission: Basel Dialogues, Vol. 2: Book Launch

The second volume of the Basel Dialogues critical book series, published by the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW (HGK Basel) and Christoph Merian Verlag, launches at Liste 2026 with a series of conversations: an introduction to the book series by editors Claudia Perren and Quinn Latimer, followed by a panel discussion with Pauline Julier and Quinn Latimer on the Political Desires of Moving Images, and concluding with a conversation between Jacqueline Loekito, and Matylda Krzykowski on Waves of Theory and Practice in Fashion and Publishing.

Desire for Transmission: On Movements of Materials and Knowledges is the second volume of Basel Dialogues, the new critical book series published by the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW and Christoph Merian Verlag. Composed of striking conversations from recent public symposia, intimate meetings, international festivals, and academic seminars, the dialogues feature the school’s professors, students, and their celebrated guests—from the fields of visual art, design, filmmaking, media theory, science, coding, and poetics—all grappling with transdisciplinary practices pursued amidst a multivalent world. Their conversations cover technologies of transmission amid conditions of surveillance and resistance; trance techniques and cybernetics of the moving image; the languages of realism and fantasy that infuse both fashion and publishing; the immaterial histories of material knowledges; and contemporary image production’s role in justice. Taken together, the diversity of voices collected here speak to issues of theory and practice, art and science, poetics and politics, denying their opposition, while revealing the deep desire for social and artistic transformation that so often propels practice and pedagogy forward. Edited by Quinn Latimer and Claudia Perren, and designed by Marietta Eugster, the Basel Dialogues series is published in collaboration with Christoph Merian Verlag in two language editions.

Talk in collaboration with Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW.

Pauline Julier is an artist and filmmaker. She explores the connections that people make with their environment through stories, rituals, knowledge, and images. Her films and installations combine elements of different origins to reflect the complexity of our relationships with the world. Her installations and films have been screened in contemporary art centers, institutions, and festivals around the world, among them, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Loop, Barcelona; Visions du Réel, Nyon; and Tokyo Wonder Site. She had a major solo exhibition of her work at Aargauer Kunsthaus, in 2024, and she is currently working on her first fiction feature film.

Matylda Krzykowski is a transdisciplinary practitioner whose global practice spans exhibitions, installations, talks, texts, exhibitions, performances, and more experimental formats. Since 2021, she has led the artistic program of CIVIC at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW. She teaches at Design Academy, in Eindhoven, and at the ZHdK, in Zurich. Recent spatial and curatorial projects include Institution Building (CIVA, Brussels, 2021), The Energy Show (Het Nieuwe Institut, Rotterdam, 2022), and Eleonore Peduzzi Riva (Kunstraum Riehen, 2024) and The Stand-Ins (Conceptual Biennale, Berlin, 2025).

Quinn Latimer heads the Fine Arts MA at Institute Art Gender Nature, at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW. She is a poet, critic, editor, and curator whose work considers literary and cinematic imaginaries and technologies as they are inscribed by issues of political desire, personal histories, and the social. She is the author of Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (2017); Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (2013); and Rumored Animals (2012). Latimer was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14, in Athens and Kassel, and she is editor of SIREN (some poetics) (2024), and coeditor of Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology (2021) and The documenta 14 Reader (2017), among many other books.

Jacqueline Loekito heads the Master Studio Fashion Design at the Institute of Fashion Design, Basel Academy of Arts and Design FHNW. She has taught at Kingston College, in London, and at the University for the Creative Arts, UK. In 2018 she founded her eponymous label, through which her research and practice examine the intersections of gender, identity, and diversity. Her brand has been presented at the British Fashion Council and Mode Suisse. Her collection, Earthlings, received the public vote award at Hochparterre, in Switzerland, in 2024.

Claudia Perren holds a doctorate in architecture from the University of Kassel and is a professor at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW (HGK Basel). Since 2020 she has been director of the HGK Basel, and since 2022, she has been vice-president of the Foundation for Art and Design in Basel (FAB). Previously, she was director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (2014–2020), and she taught at the University of Sydney and at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) for many years. Recently, she was selected as an Ewha Global Fellow (EGF) at Ewha Womans University Seoul (2024–26). Her larger practice—which encompasses research, teaching, and curating— has resulted in various exhibitions and has been widely published.