Referenz Grotesk Groundless has been designed for the research and exhibition project “Iliggocene – The Age of Dizziness”. In the beginning we have been asking how dizziness can be translated to the field of typography and type design. Can a typeface make us dizzy and provoke a feeling of disorientation by interfering with the reading flow? By spinning, slanting and shifting letterforms to different extents, we have been testing various types of disruptions. Finally we’ve decided for a simple but quite effective method: the baseline shift. By doing so we’ve created a type system with different states of dizziness via letters that shift from their baseline at different levels. 

The new font is based on our type family Referenz Grotesk and now expanded by a dizzying extension, with 15 grades of dizziness, including 140 dizzy characters. Referenz Grotesk Groundless transforms – gradually or at once – readable text to an unreadable typographic structure, challenges readers that find themselves between dis- and reorientation. (Stefanie Schwarz & Dirk Wachowiak, 2026)

Iliggocene – The Age of Dizziness
22 March – 26 July 2026
Kindl – Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Berlin

with contributions by Amanda Beech, Dominique Savitri Bonarjee, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Davide Deriu, Tim Etchells, Christian Falsnaes, Cao Fei, Julia Fiedorczuk, Dani Gal, María Auxiliadora Gálvez Pérez, William Gibson, Alexandra Grant, Eiko Grimberg, Anna Kim, Jack Halberstam, Daniel Meir, Ari Benjamin Meyers, Warren Neidich, João Onofre, Ana Prvački, Lucy Railton, Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, John Smith, Liv Schulman, Stefanie Schwarz & Dirk Wachowiak, Alexander Stahn, Marcus Steinweg, Dimitri Venkov, Catherine Yass, Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond
curated by Ruth Anderwald, Leonhard Grond and Sergio Edelsztein
type & typographic design by Stefanie Schwarz & Dirk Wachowiak