“Nature Is Culture.” Interview with Artist Timur Si-Qin, Who Brought the Amazon to Art Basel 2026

Timur Si-Qin at Art Basel: Nature Is the Ultimate Artist

At Art Basel Unlimited 2026, Mariposita brings the Peruvian Amazon into the fair. A conversation on technology, beauty, Indigenous cosmologies and the need to think of nature not only as a subject, but as culture.

Link to the Italian version on Artribune

At Art Basel, Mariposita, by Timur Si-Qin (b. 1984, Berlin), enters a space built on speed, visibility and transaction at a different pace. Presented by the gallery Société and realized in collaboration with Magician Space and the Sigg Art Foundation, it brings the Amazon into the fair without turning it into decoration, warning or exotic image. The work seduces, but it does not stop at beauty. It uses technology, but does not worship it. It speaks of ecology without relying on the usual images of collapse.

The question remains direct: can technology become a form of attention rather than domination?

From there, Si-Qin speaks about nature, 3D modelling, Indigenous cultures, spirituality and the Western separation from the living world. “I want us to focus back on nature as a culture,” he says. “That is my political project, in a way.”

Interview with Timur Si-Qin

Looking at Mariposita, are we seeing nature, a copy of nature, or a new kind of presence?

I think it is essentially the same thing that all art has been doing since cave painting: using a form of technology to depict nature. Fundamentally, I do not see it as ontologically different from previous art history.

You use advanced technologies, but technology does not seem to be the real centre of the work. Is the deeper question attention?

I am using the means I have, the knowledge and skills I have. I grew up doing 3D modelling as a teenager, through video games. My creative output has always been on the computer.

There are many aspects of nature that are quite digital, or cybernetic. Now we have technologies that can mimic nature in new ways. Still, I see it as part of the same history. Ochre in caves was once a new advanced technology.

For me, it is a process of seeing. Seeing in depth. And that is also a devotional practice. Ultimately, I think nature is the ultimate artist. Every leaf in a forest is a masterpiece.

Do people read your work through technology first, or do they recognize the spiritual core of it?

I think people have different reactions. Some see it in terms of technology. Other people recognize the spiritual core of the work.

I have been working with nature as a topic for a long time, and there has always been a kind of bias against nature in art. For me, nature is the most important topic we have to pay attention to. My work is quite earnest. It is not cynical. We do not really have time for irony.

So Mariposita comes from a lived experience in the Peruvian Amazon?

Yes. This work at Basel was made from my experiences in the Peruvian Amazon, in the Ucayali region. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. It is much more extreme than the most fantastical VR simulation or cybernetic Avatar world you can imagine.

In the last couple of years, they built a road there. Now there is logging twenty-four hours a day. Two years ago, there were forest fires everywhere. You could smell it in the air. Little black ashen leaves were floating down randomly like snowflakes.

That is heartbreaking to me because this is one of the most extremely beautiful places and experiences I have ever had.

Your work suggests a different relationship between nature, spirituality and culture. How did your background shape that?

I grew up in a Native American context. My mother became involved in Native American rights activism from Germany when I was a child. Later, she married a San Carlos Apache man in Arizona, and when I was eight years old we moved from Berlin to Arizona.

In my late childhood and teenage years, that became my cultural context. We travelled to different reservations in the Southwest and participated in ceremonies, powwows, Sundance, sweat lodge ceremonies. That was essentially my religious upbringing.

Why is the Western relationship to nature so different from many Indigenous relationships to nature?

Indigenous cultures tend to centre nature in their value systems. Their narratives involve animals, plants and relationships with those beings. In a Western context, that is not the case in the same way.

If we consider the cultures of the world, Western cultures are almost the exception. Today, Indigenous and Native people are really on the front lines protecting nature. We are often on the sidelines, watching the true battle.

Art Basel is a place of speed, spectacle and market. How can an ecological and technological work survive there?

I think there is an anti-aesthetic tradition in the post-war contemporary art context. I have felt that as a resistance to my work, which is openly engaged with spectacle, or I would say beauty.

But ultimately the mechanisms of spectacle are deeply related to cognition, to how our brains, eyes and senses work. They are not only capitalist manipulations. They are connected to the way we perceive as animals.

Why the title Mariposita?

Mariposita means little butterfly. In the Mestizo and Shipibo traditions in the Ucayali region of Peru, the spirit of the butterfly is a very powerful and important spirit of the jungle. There are many songs dedicated to the Mariposita. They are icaros, the magical songs of the Shipibo people.

Do you see beauty as a way to seduce the viewer or as a way to make the viewer responsible?

I think it has both functions.

It reminds people that these beautiful places exist, and it tries to transmit a fraction of their truth. I love bringing the body of different ecosystems into places like Basel. It is like dosing Basel, bringing the psychedelic experience of nature into that context.

It would be wonderful if I could transmit even a tenth of the wonder that I experienced when I first walked into that place. It looks like a rendering, but it is real. It really is heaven on earth.

In Mariposita and New Peace, does the sacred come from imagination, or from the living world itself?

I do not know if I can really separate the two. The experience of nature and my imagination are completely interfaced. The imagination is triggered by that experience.

At the core of all this, including New Peace, there is a rejection of the duality between human and nature. Ultimately, we are animals. All our technologies are still the extended phenotype of Homo sapiens, the ape.

Then the question of technology becomes: how do we keep the flame of technology without burning the web of life?

After Mariposita, what comes next?

Mariposita inaugurates the next body of work, which will focus on the Amazon. For the next few years, I think I will be making Amazonian trees and plants in my practice.