Darkness isn’t absence,
it’s a fertile space of possibility.
Hello Darkness
is neither a welcome nor a farewell
It’s a statement.
In this space, we slow down when everything pushes us to speed up.
Let’s turn down the volume, turn off the spotlight, choose inappropriate locations. Let’s linger where the norm demands we go further. Let’s allow doubt, contradiction, and ambiguity to become resources, not obstacles.
Public Program
/ Hello Darkness
Talks, performances, assemblies, installations, participatory practices, and listening moments. A program that explores the contradictions of the present, not seeking simplified solutions, but opening up spaces of possibility.
It’s a space for listening to hidden knowledge and marginal insights.
A field of tensions where art and culture become tools for overturning established hierarchies and imagining other ways of inhabiting the world.
It is the third stage of a journey dedicated to relationships, after The Convivial Laboratory (2024) ↗ and Making Kin (2025) ↗.
Why
/ Hello Darkness
In the depths, where light cannot reach, there exist life forms that have developed other perceptions, subtle alliances, and intermittent bioluminescence.
Similarly, in the unstable present we are living through — marked by ecological, emotional, social, and political crises — darkness can become a space of possibility, not an end.
Crossing the darkness means recognizing depth as a political and generative space. It is from the threshold between the surface and the abyss that we can rethink cultural models, forms of relationship, and the possibilities of coexistence.
Resourses
/ Hello Darkness
In this section, you’ll find ideas, reflections, articles, voices, and questions to help you explore and navigate the darkness of Hello, Darkness together.
We welcome contributions from creatives, studios, and guests who join us in this space, listening to submerged knowledge.
On Magic, The Obscene, Bodily Fluids and Witches
Liminal Practices: being disobedient and transfeminist
Disillusion and Re-enchantment
How can We mend our broken hearts?
Material Kinship
Making coalitions: design as a collective practice
World-making: new rituals and the embodiment of many worlds
Hello Darkness traces
Living Where Everything Resists. A Conversation with Donato Giovannelli and Valeria Verdolini
they shoot horses: a disco dance marathon by Phil Collins
Collective Bodies. Forms of Collectivity
Di/STRAUSS Technique by Ivo Dimchev
We Will Design
Productions 2026
Hello Darkness
Milan Design Week 2026 @ BASE
We Will Design is one of the major productions of Hello Darkness 2026
and the platform with which BASE Milano, during Design Week, gives space to the new generation of design.
Each year, BASE becomes an open laboratory of prototypes, visions, and radical practices,
where institutions, emerging designers, international schools, and universities meet.
Here, new and urgent voices emerge, using design to interrogate the present
and imagine more equitable, accessible, and informed futures.
We Will Design
Productions 2026
Hello Darkness
FAROUT 2026
FAROUT is BASE’s festival dedicated to live arts and contemporary creation.
Each edition transforms the former industrial spaces of BASE into an ecosystem of bodies, sounds, and visions: performances, dance, theater, installations, concerts, and parties.
An unruly and collective landscape, where artists and audiences meet to imagine new aesthetics, rooted in a contemporary world to be observed, once again, from far away.