volumes 2026 21 & 22 November 2026 Gessnerallee Zürich

We will explore two types of Japanese bookbinding: the classic four-hole binding and a more decorative, artistic variation. We will discuss both traditional methods and creative adaptations. Whether you want to make a simple sketchbook at home or create a sophisticated, exhibition-quality artist’s book, - you’ll learn the techniques you need to do so. You’ll take home two hand-bound booklets from the workshop to keep or give as gifts, and you’ll also receive a summary of all the techniques by email so that you can carry on binding at home straight away.

The workshop is led by Rada Nastai, founder of bruise studio, where she makes limited-edition art books. Taught the craft of bookbinding by her mother, Rada has been binding books for the past ten years and handles every stage of production in-house, from editing and printing to hardcovers, embossing and binding. She has led bookbinding workshops both as standalone sessions and in combination with other practices, such as marbling and monoprinting.

@radanastai @bruisestudio 

DORIS STAUFFER SOURCE BOOK, workshop on re-writing assigments. Atelier Zurlindas

The female members of a studio collective and their various (printed) works: Things that Hold things (Molly), artist books (Mara), beautiful scholarly texts (Magaly), cassettes (Michiko). Just like every year!

Reading of a winning entry to the Kyoto Writing Competition 2026 and artist talk by ink painting artist Mafalda Tenente.

Profundo EdicionesProfundo Ediciones, invites you to a talk on contemporary publications from the Latin American queer scene. The coordinator of Profundo, Rocío Inmensidades will share part of her personal archive around LGBTTTIQ+ community in Abya Yala territory, where the underground movement has carved out a niche in the publishing world by highlighting the intersection of gender, class, and oppression.
The talk will feature publications ranging from pop to punk, addressing topics such as sex work, gender & transitions, femicides, and the romantic poetics of resistance. 

Publishing Sound Together

Nelly Schaub’s Rebuts de refrain / I’m Not Dead and Rabasta / Tabustar by Benoît Moreau

Two recent publications by activeRat and its vinyl imprint Speckled-Toshe provide an occasion to reflect on what happens when publishing becomes a shared process.

The two projects developed in quite different ways, involving people with different practices, interests and responsibilities. Along the way, ideas changed, decisions were questioned and the publications took forms that had not been entirely planned. Working together also meant learning from one another, sometimes in ways that were not anticipated.

Laurent Schmid is an artist, publisher and curator based in Bern and Geneva. He founded activeRat in 1998, an independent publishing project working across artists’ books, editions and sound-related publications. In 2019, he co-founded Speckled-Toshe with Yann Chateigné as a vinyl imprint dedicated to collaborations between visual artists, musicians and composers.

«El Disco es Cultura», presented by Pablo C y Karo Castro who in the midst of a sound performance based on a selection of vinyl records released in Chile between 1971 and 1973, gradually transition into a poetic reading
processed through sound effects and filters.

Karo y Pablo conforms the publishing project SE IMPRIME and they are among the group of exhibitors at this year's edition of volumes Zürich.

In addition, poet Carlos Soto Román will also present «Set of Alternative Procedures» which moves between documentary, lyric and concrette poetry, incorporating archival recordings of the 1973 coup d'etat and the 2019 social uprising, with the aim of completely immersing the audience in the realm of the unspeakable.
 

Das unendliche Buch – Make your own Leporello

This workshop introduces children to the world of self-publishing in a playful way. By folding a single strip of paper, participants create a leporello (fold-out book)—a book with no end. Based on the Leporello series by www.morenotuttobene.com.

This project takes the form of an artist publication centred on the construction, performance and transformation of a ceramic sculpture. Bringing together text, photography and a leporello, it traces the life of the work from its making, through embodied encounters, to its gradual return to the earth.
The project begins with the construction of a sculpture whose purpose is to make connection tangible: a physical link between two people, two bodies. Clay functions as a protective skin, creating a space of trust in which an encounter can unfold. As the sculpture is gradually exposed to time and the elements, it becomes both an object and a record of its own transformation. Ceramic bodies is housed in a box containing a leporello and a booklet that
document a two-part performance involving three participants. The first part brings together a dancer and a ceramic artist; the second follows the artist in collaboration with a photographer. The ceramicist is the connecting presence across both. From body to clay explores the encounter between a dancer and a ceramic artist inhabiting a womb-like clay structure they shaped together. Through movement and touch, the work examines intimacy, trust and the reciprocal relationship between body and material.
From clay to soil follows the sculpture after it is placed in a garden, where it gradually degrades through its interaction with the surrounding environment. As the clay erodes, cracks, softens and is reabsorbed into the landscape, the work continues beyond human intervention, allowing natural processes to complete the piece.

The fitness app Strava records its users’ running or cycling routes with GPS data. Some turn their training into figurative drawings. The service also releases a heatmap of all public activities. In 2018, this map exposed soldiers’ training activity and blueprints of remote military bases. In 2024, Le Monde revealed that bodyguards’ workouts gave away the location of world leaders on official trips. This coloring book pays tribute to these athletic artists while playfully addressing the sensitivity of GPS data.
- Objet Papier is a micro-press label from Montreuil, France. Since 2016, it published numerous photographies, illustrations, words and digital experimental works. This collective gives graphic and literacy free hand to artists who are interested in bypassing traditional paper edition. On the contrary of digital standardization, Objet Papier questions and discusses the different media, as a non-native generation does.
Berenice Serra is a media artist based in Zürich. Her work explores how images circulate within networked environments, drawing on user-generated content, open-source intelligence (OSINT), and post-digital writing systems. Working in the tradition of tactical media, she is interested in everyday uses of technology that challenge existing systems.
- We will send you a picture once it will be ready, thanks for your patience
- @objet_papier + @berenice.serra

Folium & Oliver Griffin are tuning into the signal, searching for an encounter. Strange lights over Switzerland and FIGU messages from beyond the stars. Expect a live transmission of archival pages, samples and voices drifting through VHS static. A puppet show for believers.

The truth is out there
We want to believe
Eyes on the sky

Stewart Hardie is a visual artist and the founder of Folium, an artist-led publishing platform in London. Raised in a book printing factory amid mass production, Hardie has long been drawn to counter culture, DIY and underground music scenes, which shape a practice across photography, print, sound and performance. Hardie studied at Swansea College of Art and the Royal College of Art, and has held residencies at La Cité internationale des arts in Paris and ISSP in Riga, Latvia. Hardie co-runs the experimental music event MAGICK and nurtures collective spaces for artists to experiment and make work together. Hardie also performs in the A/V artist duo Coaxial Point.
 

Oliver Griffin is a photographic based visual artist (UK / CH) who works with found objects in tune with Object-Oriented Ontology* to understand the world around us through common objects and places. Influenced by Si-Fi literature, ideas of time & space, along with looking into “Voids”. These abstract ideas create playfully, yet serious typological bodies of work which that are closely linked within the artists personality. This ranges from bicycles to Horology, producing self-published artist books that accompany large installations of works within a holistic methodology.

We are SoliSoli, a Zurich-based non-profit organization raising funds for two local organizations in Belgrade (KlikAktiv) and Sarajevo (Kompass071) supporting the rights of people on the move in the EU buffer zones in the Western Balkans.

SoliSoli
The SoliSoli team is made up, among others, of artists, illustrators, cultural workers and activists whose practices result in SoliSoliMerch & SoliSoliPrints (with messages such as "Augen Auf Herzen Auf Grenzen Auf"), printed by ourselves (at, for example, Dynamo, PostSquatt, etc.) or in collaboration with screen-printing collectives (such as, for example, Matrijarsija in Belgrade, when we are there), as well as SoliSoliWaffles (a custom-made waffle machine realized in collaboration between SoliSoli X Stirnimann-Stojanovic, cooking waffles shaped as brick walls, imprinted with the words "Brick by Brick, Wall by Wall," to be dismantled through the act of eating).

We usually participate in events in the realm of activism and art. Our presence with SoliSoli at events such as Volumes, with our SoliSoliMerch & Waffles, enables us to raise awareness about the important activities of both local organizations in Belgrade and Sarajevo, and to raise funds for them: all proceeds are donated to them, 50% / 50%. 
Besides printed words/matter, some of our members occasionally participate in giving talks, or we share the important work on field reports produced by the members of the collective in Belgrade and Sarajevo.

Puzzeln feiert die Langsamkeit, den Unsinn und das Zusammensein in dieser überfordernden Zeit. Puzzeln ist Fokus, frei von Wettbewerb und eventuell auch ein auf die Essenz eingedampfter Vorgang von gelebter Demokratie. Denise Wintsch‘s Puzzletisch schlägt wie ein kollidierter Meteorit an belebten Orten in der Öffentlichkeit ein. Der Puzzletisch, eine entrückte Ruhe-Oase und Safe Space, der Raum für Begegnungen schafft - niedrigschwellig und offen für alle. Ein Campingtisch, vier Stühle, ein Puzzle und Zeit - mehr braucht es nicht, um gemeinsam einzutauchen in die heilige Kleinteiligkeit eines 1‘000-er Puzzles. Piece! 

Denise Wintsch ist eine Zürcher Künstlerin. Ihr kreatives Schaffen oszilliert an der Schnittstelle von Theater und bildender Kunst.
 

Try out the ancestor of office copy machines running with nothing else than elbow grease! The company "Cito AG" from Basel produced incredibly resilient but nowadays obsolete stencil duplicating machines between the 1930s and the 1970s.

Balthazar Wyss is born in Geneva in 1992, he studied conservation-restoration and is now living in Basel. Under the label TEKOOP TEHUUR, he focusses his artistic practice on drawing, photography, darkrooms, screen-printing, stencil duplication and self-publishing.