Mesh - Festival für Kunst und Technologie
Mesh is a recurring festival for art and technology in Basel. The programme spans exhibitions, performances, screenings and workshops, complemented by a conference of talks, panels and lecture performances.
Infrastructures of Care
This year’s edition, titled Infrastructures of Care, asks how we want to live together: how we can use, shape and change technologies to support more just and caring ways of doing so. Mesh creates spaces for connection, exchange and solidarity, understanding care as something held in common and shaped together. At its centre stands one question: How do we want to live together — and how can technologies help us get there?
Contents of the 2026 edition
The programme is structured around seven care themes:
Commons of Connection shows how closeness emerges, even when encounters increasingly take place digitally. Memory Machines asks who decides what gets remembered, and preserves suppressed knowledge. Future Playgrounds creates cross-generational spaces for collectively testing out futures. Wild Cities brings cities into focus as habitats for humans, animals, and plants. Circular Systems centres on ecological and technological cycles rather than consumption.
Non-Public Publics (in collaboration with Make/Sense and IXDM) mobilises practices for defying logics of fragmentation. Rounding out the programme is the hands-on theme Urban Actions | Spatial Utopias lead by iArt, through which Mesh also takes shape in large-scale spatial installations.
First Highlights
Exhibition: Gabriel Abrantes, Sophia Bulgakova, Martin Messier
Performance: Aïsha Devi, Noémi Büchi in cooperation with Brigitte Fässler, Buena Tarde & ztaa, Myriam Bleau und Nien Tzu Weng, Slikback
Conference: Anna Puigjaner & Ethel Baraona Pohl, Wendy Chun, Frauke Fischer
Club Nights: Demdike Stare and others