Art Basel Unlimited 2026
MARIPOSITA by Timur Si-Qin
15 - 21 JUNE 2026
Basel, Switzerland
At Art Basel Unlimited 2026, the Sigg Art Foundation supported Mariposita, an immersive sculptural installation by Timur Si-Qin presented by Société in collaboration with Magician Space, within the Unlimited sector curated by Ruba Katrib. A German-born artist of Mongolian-Chinese descent, Si-Qin works across sculpture, moving image, and installation to imagine new spiritual protocols for relating to the living world in the face of climate change and biodiversity collapse.
A FOREST TRANSLATED AT FULL SCALE
Mariposita takes its title from the Spanish for “little butterfly,” and from the blue morpho butterflies Si-Qin encountered during periods of isolation deep in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon. Based on 3D scans made by the artist of a Renaco tree and its surrounding pond ecosystem, the installation translates buttress roots, insects, water, plant matter, and reflected light into stainless steel and moving image, at the 1:1 scale of the living tree. Scanning and projection are not used here to master the forest but to attend to it, creating a space of heightened attention in which technological reproduction becomes a devotional act.
TO MIRROR IS TO NAME
For Si-Qin, the work is a meditation on the concept of the pristine: living worlds so intact, vivid, and self-generating that they can feel almost impossible from within contemporary life. As direct experience of such ecosystems becomes rare, images of the pristine are often dismissed as romantic or aspirational — yet that apparent unreality reveals how distant modern culture has become from the systems that sustain it.
Representation, for the artist, is not a distancing from nature but a way of acknowledging its presence. “To mirror is to name,” he says, “and to name is an act of devotion.” In Mariposita, this mirroring becomes both artistic method and ecological ethic: a gesture toward the forest spirits of the Ucayali, the fragile worlds threatened by extraction and deforestation, and the possibility of learning to walk differently within the living fabric of the earth.