Every age produces its own spells.
Some promise salvation.
Others, progress.
Others, security, speed, efficiency.
They seduce us. They orient us. They blind us.
They work because we stop recognizing them as such, and they end up coinciding with the very way we look at the world. The most effective spells never present themselves as magic. They present themselves as reality.
FAROUT 2026 with HELLO DARKNESS ↗ wants to linger into the darkness to restore sight to our blinded gaze. Not to dispel the darkness, but to redefine the contours of disenchantment through artistic practices capable of interrupting the automatisms of the present. We dissolve the spells of the present and open the space to new counter-spells, new forms of perception, relationship, and imagination. Gestures that shatter what seems inevitable. Narratives that reopen possibilities. Bodies, sounds, images, and rituals that restore complexity to what has been simplified and depth to what remains on the surface.
The program develops through 4 trajectories that cross the entire program:
Visible / Invisible
The world that is born often grows where we don’t look. Underrepresented bodies, submerged memories, marginalized voices, invisible relationships between territories and communities. FAROUT explores what escapes the surface and questions the conditions that determine what can be seen, told, recognized and what remains excluded, hidden or marginalised.
The Magic and the Unknown
In a world that demands immediate explanations and constant rationalization, the Festival restores space to mystery, intuition, and imagination. Magic here isn’t an escape from reality, but a way to navigate it differently. Contemporary rituals, emerging mythologies, ancestral wisdom, and nonlinear forms of understanding become tools for inhabiting complexity without diminishing it.
The Dark Side
The technologies shaping the present promise connection, efficiency, and access, but they also produce new forms of control, surveillance, extraction, and dependence. FAROUT explores the shadowy areas of contemporary innovation, challenging dominant narratives of progress and opening a critical space on the relationships between humans, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and digital systems.
The Joyful Night
Night suspends the hierarchies of the day. It shifts rhythms, alters perceptions, and enables unexpected encounters. FAROUT embraces the nocturnal dimension as a political and sensorial condition: a space in which to slow down, listen, lose oneself, and imagine. Durational performances, immersive experiences, and collective practices invite audiences to experience time differently, escaping the logic of continuous productivity.
Thus FAROUT ↗ continues the journey initiated by BASE in the performing arts.
In this new season, darkness is not a limit to be overcome but a living threshold: a place of crossing where the gaze becomes unaccustomed to the light and begins to see again.
Because, today more than ever, we need to learn to recognize the darkness.