Mirko Baselgia @ Edition VFO - Zürich

To mark International Environment Day, Swiss Post is launching the new art edition ‘inter-respirar’ in cooperation with Edition VFO and the artist Mirko Baselgia. The work builds on Baselgia's ‘re-respirar’ stamp from 2024 and transforms its central motif - a human windpipe with bronchial tree, inverted and upside down - into an image of a tree that symbolises the intertwining of human and plant life. The image becomes a metaphor for the interplay of respiration and photosynthesis, light and dark, the visible and the invisible.

The edition was created in close collaboration with the Ticino textile designer Matteo Gehringer, who is the fourth generation to practise blue dyeing. It was printed using the traditional Ticino blue printing process, in which a specially manufactured wooden model is coated with so-called pappé - a paste-like protective mass - and pressed onto antique linen. After several indigo dyeing processes, the treated areas remain colour-repellent - as fine white lines, as zones of absence, as traces of what could not penetrate.

inter-respirar, 2025

The base material, hand-woven linen that is around two hundred years old, was obtained from flax and spun. Gehringer prepared and bleached it for this edition. The printing form is based on a drawing by Baselgia, which was CNC-milled into a piece of sycamore maple - a hybrid act between digital precision technology and traditional material awareness.

“inter-respirar” is published in an edition of 99 copies as a cooperation between Swiss Post and Edition VFO. Each work in the edition is unique, signed and numbered by the artist on the back and machine-embroidered on the front with signature, year and edition number by Casutt AG in Chur. The edition will be available from June 5 via Edition VFO and in the Swiss Post store.