Hello, Darkness

In an age of hyperexposure, it is an invitation to explore darkness in all its forms: from the darkness of the abyss, where some species thrive without light, developing perceptions, alliances, and bioluminescence, to the darkness of our unstable and ferocious present, marked by ecological, emotional, social, and political crises.

To greet this darkness, not by fleeing from it, but by moving through it, recognizing it as a space of possibility, means knowing how to look at the darkness of our time, without averting our gaze, grasping in it not an end but a still inaccessible possibility. (Agamben, What is the Contemporary?)

A listening space for submerged epistemologies and intuitions emerging from the invisible. This is the third installment in the trilogy that BASE dedicates to relationships —after The Convivial Laboratory (2024) and Making Kin (2025) — a journey that, starting from Donna Haraway’s thought, imagines forms of care between humans, non-humans, and the more-than-human, and new modalities of sensitive cohabitation.

It is a field of tensions and possibilities, where darkness becomes a fertile condition, a place of resistance and a building block for desirable futures. Exploring the cracks of the present, the program places artistic and cultural practice at the center of a reversal of consolidated infrastructures and predefined hierarchies, opening up unexpected scenarios, imagining alternative ecologies, cities, and societies, intertwining design, art, technologies, and forms of relationship with other intelligences.

In this context, we embrace opacity as an ethical and aesthetic orientation. Following Édouard Glissant, opacity is not obscuration but relational possibility: a way of inhabiting otherness without reducing or absorbing it, preserving the complexity of reality and the vitality of mystery. Darkness is not absence: it is the origin of new forms of presence, coexistence, and beauty.

In the darkness, affective geographies, nonlinear presences, and subtle networks of alliances are activated. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs reminds us in Undrowned, we can learn from marine mammals: modulating our breathing, diving and resurfacing, coexisting with pressure. “Underwatering” becomes a political and sensorial practice for reframing the rhythms, gestures, and possibilities of healing—breathing into the pressure, not against it; moving between currents without being overwhelmed; resurfacing not only driven by trauma, but by choice.

Let us imagine acts of mutual care to move, collaborate, and inhabit the darkness with awareness and intention. Flashing lights, sparks, and rare flashes guide the path: like abyssal creatures that emit light in the darkness, even the most marginal cultural practices, invisible gestures, and unspoken words harbor profound intuitions, micro-utopias capable of opening up passages in the present.

It preserves what cannot be fully seen. BASE chooses the abyss as a symbolic site and critical stance from which to rethink its program: a topography of active fractures that welcomes situated knowledge, indigenous, queer, diasporic, decolonial, and ancestral perspectives.

The program intertwines visual arts, performance, speculative design, music, theory, and community practices in a fertile and relational landscape. BASE becomes a platform capable of welcoming artists, researchers, and communities that inhabit the margins and generate the future.

Passing through darkness means recognizing depth as a political and generative space. It is from this threshold, between surface and depth, that we can rethink modes of relationship, cultural models, and forms of coexistence. HELLO DARKNESS opens a space where what is not immediately visible becomes material for imagining other ways of designing, collaborating, and inhabiting the present.

In a present enchanted by continuous visibility, by exercises of supremacy and by the dictatorship of performance, HELLO DARKNESS slows down when it should speed up, turns down the volume, turns off the spotlights, uses inappropriate spaces, seeks contradiction, lingers when the rule is to go further.

Let’s create a space where not everything needs to be clear, useful, or immediately translatable, a place where opacity is not a defect but a condition, where magic operates by relying on invisible forces, unexpected alliances, and forms of congregation that escape the logic of the individual and control. Let’s put mystery and ambiguity back at the center, not as gaps to be filled, but as forms of active knowledge, political tools that make it possible to inhabit complexity without reducing it.

It is in this shared darkness that what has been excluded, invisible, or marginalized can once again operate as a generative force, capable of activating alliances, imaginaries, and forms of care that escape control and open, in the present, the possibility of other futures.