Exhibition
The culture stays on the walls. The interface decides the route, the pace, and whether you may stop.
Every organisation has a culture, and most of it is invisible: the way things are done, the things nobody has to say. What an audience meets is only the surface — the artefacts. We design those artefacts so the depth underneath becomes legible: a format, a film, an object, an evening. A cultural media studio based in Zürich.
Start with one formatEvery organisation, every scene, every trade has more culture than it can show. What's scarce is the artefact: the one thing an outsider can meet that carries what's underneath. Sixteen seconds, five moves.
Culture is what a group of people already does, keeps and repeats. In an orchestra, a farm, a fashion house or a neighbourhood it has the same shape: three depths, and only the top one shows.
Visible. The artefacts. The building, the programme, the website, the uniform, the product, the way the room is laid out. Anyone can point at them.
Practised. How things are actually done. How a rehearsal runs, who decides, how the audience is spoken about when it isn't there. Rules nobody wrote down and everybody keeps.
Assumed. What is taken for granted. Who this is for. What counts as serious. What would be unthinkable. The things so obvious inside that nobody says them.
An audience never touches the lower two depths directly. It meets the artefact and reads the rest from it — or fails to. When an institution's audience ages, its practice and its assumptions are usually intact. What has stopped working is the artefact: it no longer carries them to anyone who wasn't already there.
That is the work. We read all three depths of a culture, decide what from underneath needs to surface, and design the artefact that brings it up — a format, a film, an object, an evening. Whatever the medium, a good artefact does three things the culture can't do by itself.
A voice becomes a book, a room becomes a recording, a craft becomes a class. The interface carries the culture to people who were never in the room.
A performance for ten becomes a concert for two thousand, a podcast for two million, an exhibition open six months. The interface lets more people meet the culture than the culture could meet on its own.
The one that gets forgotten. A culture only grows when its audience can become part of it — when the listener can play, the reader can write, the guest can host. Some interfaces allow this. Most don't.
Institutions with an ageing audience usually have artefacts that spread and scale perfectly well. What their artefacts stopped doing is growing.
The culture is fine — all three depths of it. The artefact just stopped carrying them.
We don't fix the culture. We design the artefact.
An exhibition, a concert, a book, a podcast, a dinner, a game, a street — none of them is the culture. Each one is an interface that decides where the audience stands, how long it stays, and what it is allowed to do. Filled dots are culture. Hollow dots are the audience. The rest is the format.
The culture stays on the walls. The interface decides the route, the pace, and whether you may stop.
Culture at one end, audience at the other. The interface decides the distance, the silence, and when to applaud.
One reader, one culture, one page at a time. The interface decides the order — and lets the reader control the clock.
Culture laid out in a grid. The interface decides what is glanced at and what is read; the reader scans, and chooses.
A single frame holds a moment still. The interface is the edge: what's inside is culture, what's outside is everyone passing by.
Several cultures at once. The interface decides how the audience moves between them, and what happens on the way.
One voice, many listeners, each alone and at their own hour. The interface decides the intimacy — and gives the clock to the listener.
Culture at the front, audience in rows — but here the audience is meant to become culture. The interface decides how fast, and whether it's allowed.
Everyone is culture and audience in turn. The interface is the table: who sits where, who speaks next, how long it lasts.
The rules are the interface. Culture is on the board; the audience moves one step at a time, and cannot skip.
No threshold, no order, no ticket. Culture at the edges, everyone passing at their own speed — the format nobody designed, and the one that always works.
We don't make culture. We don't produce it, curate it, or explain it to death. We design the artefact — the one thing an audience can actually meet — so that a culture that already exists becomes legible to people who were never inside it.
Every culture has three depths. What it shows, what it practises, what it assumes. An audience only ever touches the first. A good artefact carries the other two up with it — and most institutions inherited theirs from a version of the audience that no longer exists.
An old format doesn't fail because the culture behind it went stale. It fails because nobody has redesigned the artefact since the hall was built.
We read the three depths of any cultural practice before we design anything — not to replace what's there, but to find what has stopped surfacing.
An artefact that works stops needing us. It belongs to the people who came, and keeps working long after our name is off it.
First the culture, then the format.
Every project starts the same way, whatever the medium ends up being. We spend time inside the culture before we touch the surface. The design question is never "what should this look like" — it's "what from underneath has to come up".
Sit inside the culture. Map what is visible, what is practised and what is assumed — on site, with the people who hold it, not from the brief.
Decide what from the lower depths has to surface for this audience. Usually one thing. The rest stays where it is.
Build the artefact that carries it: a format, a film, an object, an evening. Sized so the institution's own team can run it without us.
Pilot it once, on the ground, then give it away. An artefact that works stops needing us.
The questions we bring into a culture. Not a checklist to complete — a way of noticing what everyone inside has stopped seeing.
Each case is read the same way. What was visible. What was practised or assumed underneath and didn't show. And the artefact that brought it up.
A global tech brand with excellent products and a Swiss presence that looked like everywhere else: polished, international, distant. To Gen Z in Switzerland, Samsung was visible and not desirable. The features went unnoticed because nothing about the surface said this is about you.
Practised: a Swiss youth that tells its stories through landscape, accent and everyday reality — and almost never hears that in tech advertising. Assumed, and never said: that a large part of young Switzerland has a migration background, and that its sound is the sound of the country now.
A short video staging the Smart Tag as a message in a bottle — dropped at the Rheinfall, tracked across the country. The tracking function became the narrative. The decisive choice was the voiceover: a distinctly migrant accent, somewhere between Albanian and Latin American. That voice brought the assumption to the surface. Friction, attention, recognition.
Social media content for Samsung Switzerland.
Co-conceived and directed with Philippe Arbenz (client communication, project management) and Josué Kehl (co-editing, camera). Concept and art direction: Darius Fischer.
A symphony orchestra, a concert hall, an education programme. From outside, Community Music in Kleinhüningen looked like outreach: an institution doing something good for a diverse neighbourhood.
Practised: a week in which children from the orchestra's programmes and children from the local Spielwerkstatt make music together, across every social line in the city — process, not product. Assumed, inside: that what emerged between those two worlds was the actual value, and that no institutional voice could say so without flattening it.
A documentary in eight sequences, following the project as it actually happened: first rehearsal, the neighbourhood, the children explaining in their own words what they made and how it felt, the leads on the mission, the final concert as proof. No narration imposed from outside. The children carry the practice to the surface themselves.
Image film for Sinfonieorchester Basel and Spielwerkstatt Kleinhüningen.
Storyboard and video conception: Darius Fischer.
A hotel brand's bar at a mountain festival, and a Swiss dating platform built around real-life encounters. Two logos, one stand.
Practised, already: the Revier bar was where people ended up when they wanted to linger. Strangers approached each other, exchanged glances, stayed longer than planned. Assumed by both brands, and never said out loud: the best matches happen in person, and a festival is where that already happens without anyone's help.
Three live activations that gave the existing practice a concrete shape. A wristband station where singles could mark themselves open to being approached. A Herzblatt-style blind date show on a mini-stage by the container, filmed before a live crowd. A mobile kissing cam. Each produced social content as it ran — the stand became the set.
Brand partnership concept and content production for Revier Hotels × noii at Open Air Lumnezia.
Conceived and directed by Darius Fischer. Moderation: Laura. Camera: Tim.
A financial culture built on planning, responsibility, preparedness, and long-term thinking — the kind that already lives in the firm's practice, and that a client normally only meets as advice.
Practised: a way of thinking about money that the firm applies every day and rarely explains — balance, reserve, time horizon, margin. Assumed: that a client who understands these principles is a better client, and that understanding arrives through the hands sooner than through a document.
A collection of puzzle cubes, one per concept: balance, compounding, liquidity, reserve, time horizon, diversification, priorities, margin, progress. Clients discover each idea through play. Opening a cube requires observation, thoughtful decisions, and an understanding of how individual actions add up to a result.
Each mechanism makes an abstract idea tangible: setting something aside, distributing resources, reinvesting a reward, following a sequence.
To be documented once the collection has been in clients' hands for a season.
Take the concept out of the conversation and put it in the client's hands. Where a financial idea is usually explained, this format lets it be solved — and a solved idea is one the client owns.
Nine cubes, nine values. The values proposed for each cube can be tailored to the company's identity and message; the mechanisms stay.
A collectible gift: solved, kept, displayed, shared.
The cubes are designed as gifts that clients can solve, keep, display, and share. Their common shape creates a recognisable collection, while each mechanism introduces a different challenge and meaning.
A new cube can mark an anniversary, a meeting, or a milestone in the client relationship. Over time, the collection becomes a physical reminder of that relationship, connecting the brand with discovery, learning, and thoughtful decision-making.
Every cube holds a reward. Together, they share a way of thinking.
Every field has its own three depths. These are the ones we're inside at the moment, and the artefacts taking shape in each.
Farmers, land, seasons — a rural knowledge that stays rural because nothing carries it out.
Garments, making, care — and the second life of things that the industry practises but rarely shows.
Orchestras and halls with an ageing audience and a repertoire that isn't. The field the studio grew out of.
Neighbourhoods, reciprocity, favours, everyday know-how — a culture everyone practises and nobody has an artefact for.
A culture that already exists, with an audience that doesn't yet know how to enter it. If that sounds like yours, start below.
If there is a culture you're inside and an audience that hasn't found its way in, write to us.
kulturformat
[legal form and registered name]
[street and number]
[postcode] Zürich, Switzerland
hello@kulturformat.ch
Responsible for content: [name]. Commercial register: [CHE-number].
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