It feels increasingly hard to find events worth attending that don’t leave a sour taste, that aren’t just a hollow photo opportunity, or that often have nothing to say at all. In Milan’s endless churn of events, someone is betting everything on substance. That’s the case with FAROUT, the performing arts festival by BASE Milano, which this year builds its programme around a single theme, Hello Darkness, to be read as an invitation to flip the gaze, to treat darkness not as an absence of vision but as a condition to inhabit, a ground where imaginaries take shape that in plain light would stay invisible.
The festival, running since September and keeping Milan’s audience company until early December, is built as a diffuse ecosystem of performances, installations and participatory practices that question the relationship between visibility and power, body and transformation, knowledge and mystery.
Three events, among the many on the programme, capture the depth of this exploration well.
On October 1st and 2nd, NON + ULTRAS by Moritz Ostruschnjak takes the stage, where darkness is not stillness but explosion. Eight performers move through the imagery of football fandom, between stadium chants, flares and mascots, to probe the increasingly thin line between belonging, protest and spectacle. Ultras culture, politics and social media overlap in a continuous stream of references, painting the portrait of a polarised society that recognises, and loses, itself in its own collective symbols.
On October 9th, in BASE’s Ground Hall, comes Relay by Ula Sickle, staging a black flag passed from hand to hand without ever stopping, for four hours straight. The gesture recalls Poland’s Czarny Protest and the mobilisations in defence of women’s rights, but the Canadian-Polish choreographer strips it of any direct rhetoric, letting the repetition of the movement build meaning on its own. The flag becomes an object that crosses different struggles without belonging exclusively to any of them, and resistance is measured in the bodies’ ability to keep acting together, without interruption.
On November 21st, meanwhile, Sognare, forse dormire by Collettivo EFFE pushes the question of what it means to be present in the dark even further. For eight hours, the audience is invited to lie down in Room 1400 and cross the night between waking and sleep, accompanied by a guiding voice, a sound composition and discreet appearances by performers and musicians. It’s not a performance to watch but one to move through with a sleeping body, a collective experiment in lucid dreaming that turns rest, usually a private gesture, into a shared and vulnerable practice.
Lined up together, these works tell the same festival from opposite angles, the body that identifies with a crowd, the body that resists, the body that surrenders. This is how Hello Darkness becomes a method, a way of asking the audience to stay inside uncertainty instead of resolving it, and to discover that right there, where there seems to be no light, something can still be seen.
Find every FAROUT event on the official website and follow the Instagram profile so you don’t miss any updates.
