This year’s edition takes place in a former private bank located in the heart of the city, on Basel’s oldest street. In keeping with its tradition of site-specific programming, the 2025 edition engages directly with the building’s symbolic and material past. This year’s theme draws inspiration from the language of finance and exchange, exploring systems of value, commerce, and trade. The resulting exhibition, performance program and culinary options unfold within the bank setting, where boundaries dissolve between currency and care, luxury and necessity, spectacle and service.

In her ongoing series High Rise (2021–), Mia Sanchez looks at life inside high-rise buildings by exploring the class dynamics embedded in this type of architecture. She reflects on how our built surroundings shape behavior, emotions, and moral choices. For Basel Social Club, Sanchez presents freestanding, lamp-like sculptures arranged in groups to resemble a city skyline. Made from cardboard tubes wrapped in digital collages of existing high-rise facades and topped with lampshades, each sculpture feels like its own character, occupying the space between public and private life. Through this assemblage, Sanchez blurs the line between fiction and reality, reflecting on the psychological impact of architecture as both a place of shelter and a structure of control.

In her new series Stocks Go Boom (2025), Georgie Nettell presents a balloon installation alongside a new series of drawings. The installation features balloons printed with the names of major global arms manufacturers: Rheinmetall, AVIC, Lockheed Martin, Airbus, and Hanwha, etc., while the drawings carry a wry sense of irony in phrases such as Recession Story, The Rising Yen and The Setting Dollar, Balance Is a Complex Thing, and The Only Thing More Valuable Than Bitcoin Is Time. With these works, Nettell playfully draws attention to a darker reality—the ballooning profits in a world shaped by war and political instability—offering a critique of the inflated gains of arms manufacturers amid ongoing global conflict, where violence drives economic profit at tremendous human cost.