BASEL SOCIAL CLUB 2026
Madé van Krimpen is participating in the fifth edition of Basel Social Club from June 14–20.
This year the focus of Social Club is on the space of the office, understood not as a site of production, but of critical reflection of its role in society. Once a symbol of efficiency and growth, the office today reflects shifting realities shaped by digitalization, remote work, and artificial intelligence. Basel Social Club engages in this condition through exhibitions, performances, music, gastronomy, and informal encounters that explore questions of labor, time, productivity, and rest. 
C-800 (Spring Cooler) 2026, 50x50x133cm, Found water cooler, PU, PVC, PLA, silikon, jesmonite, stainless steel, water pump, nuts, bolts
The Office
Responding to the buildings former use, Madé van Krimpen presents works by Moreno Schweikle. His sculpture series ‚Spring Coolers‘ (2021-ongoing) explores the water cooler as a symptomatic artifact of todays changing workplace culture. Becoming an integral part of office environments in the 1990s, the water cooler nowadays sits at a juncture of redundancy and growing relevance.
Schweikle’s work naturally integrates in this years curatorial concept embodying how objects incite ,informal gatherings‘. They do so on two levels: For one, fountains inherently invite for contemplation and reflection, as the sound and movement of running water has a calming effect on the mind and body. Secondly, the artists modifications on found water coolers, frees them from their redundancy and opening up alternative ways of existing.
This semiotic approach connects different layers of meaning. Their form and decorative elements link the industrialized object back to it’s origin in historic city square fountains. For the newest work ‚C-800` (2026) the artist modeled the ornamentation after facade elements of the Basel Cathedral and other romanesque fountains located in the historic center of Basel.
Each Spring Cooler is realized through a dialogue between physical and digital means of materialization. Combining 3D modeling and 3D printing with more traditional ways of sculpture-making such as molding, casting. In their making, the works reflect on how the tools we employ of everyday work amplifying or diminishing, our sense of achievement or fulfillment.
In two of the new works Schweikle turns to the inner workings of the water coolers. Translated in a charcoal drawing the idiosyncratic connections seem to mirror bureaucratic processes and mechanisms that are not logic but necessary for a larger system to function.
V-500 (Spring Cooler) 2025, 32x31x100cm, Found water cooler, pvc, silicone, led, electric motor, magnet, steel, nuts, bolts
About the artist
Moreno Schweikle is a visual artist, based in Düsseldorf, Germany.
In his practice, the manipulation of form, material and context of objects with a recognized use in the world becomes a vehicle to unlock their plural histories and invite the co-presence of old and new meaning. Recent presentations include ‚Gripper 1/Gripper 2‘ at BPA, Cologne, ‚Five Minutes (Late)‘ artistic interventions in public space in Frankfurt am Main, and ‚Our World‘ at Lucas Hirsch, Düsseldorf.
His work is currently on view at 50Litre in Amsterdam and Fondazione Dries Van Noten in Venice, Italy.