I have just set foot on Brazilian soil, after a 12-hour journey by air—a mode of travel that increasingly burdens my conscience. Still, I arrive with intention. A dark one. Though not the darkness that headlines the crises of our time. This is another kind of darkness. One that precedes human crisis, and perhaps, offers a counter to it. I’m talking about the kind of darkness that divides day from night, that creates space for rest, reflection, and connection to ourselves and the cosmos.
In many places, the night is constantly illuminated, flattening the contrast between day and night, and dimming our relationship with starry skies and the natural rhythms our bodies still rely on. It is now widely recognised that these ever-brighter nights carry serious consequences for human health and for the flourishing of all other lifeforms on Earth.¹ This reality affects me deeply, and I believe it deserves far more attention than it currently receives.
Yet, the darkness that draws me on this journey is not merely a physical condition, it is a mental and cultural one too. Within the Western aesthetic tradition, light has long been synonymous with truth, knowledge, and revelation. From Enlightenment metaphorics² to photography’s obsession with exposure,³ clarity has functioned as both value and method. Darkness, by contrast, has been pushed to the margins—a visual and conceptual void, coded as primitive, evil, or obscure.⁴ But in other cosmologies and artistic lineages, this dichotomy collapses. Here, darkness holds epistemological weight.
I came to Brazil with the intention of exploring this weight by raising questions such as: How does the withdrawal of light reconfigure our sensory and cognitive engagement with the natural environment? And: How can darkness be performed, rather than represented, within a visual or installation-based art practice?
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Brazil offers a unique setting in which to explore these questions. It is a land of contradictions—urban nature, light and dark, rich and poor, safety and insecurity, and so on. It is also a country marked by a dark history of colonialism and ongoing extractivism, which continues to damage Indigenous communities and local ecologies with a global impact.⁵
Yet beyond this violent past, the land I have arrived in is also a place of cultural and spiritual convergence. Brazil’s rich heritage and abundant natural sites create an opportunity to engage with the world through other lenses—particularly Afro-diasporic and Indigenous animist frameworks. In many of these worldviews, darkness is not an absence but a presence—a space of gestation, of becoming.⁶
In Afro-Brazilian cosmologies such as Candomblé, for example, the night is not simply a backdrop for ritual, but an active participant. Spirits emerge not in daylight’s clarity, but in the obscurity where worlds blur. The visible and the invisible cohabitate, and knowledge is not extracted through illumination, but received through attunement. ⁷
With this in mind, I do not seek to represent darkness or extract meaning from it—especially not from a land that has already been exploited for so long. Instead, I hope to perform darkness. To construct aesthetic experiences that engage viewers not as spectators, but as embodied, sensuous, and participatory presences.8
Darkness, in this sense, becomes both medium and message. Through it, I aim to decenter the Western scopic regime and propose another kind of aesthetic knowledge: one rooted not in clarity or control, but in resonance, proximity, and a situated attunement to the land.
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Since last year, I’ve been preparing for this journey through an extended period of reading, writing, and watching.⁹ What followed was a long trajectory of funding applications and artist residency proposals — with plenty of space in between for doubt, questioning, and uncertainty.
Yet, I feel that this journey is one I need to make—to grow artistically and personally. Eventually, after letting the work return to the places that held and shaped it into being, I hope to contribute further by bringing the experience of natural darkness to those who, like me, have rarely—or never—truly encountered it. Not as a commodity, but as a form of healing, a re-alignment with something that was once close to every being, and has now become distant for most.
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Thank you for reading and still hanging out there. If you’d like to stay tuned as my work and thoughts gradually take shape, please stay subscribed and join me on this journey. I plan to share monthly updates in both essayistic and visual form.
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Footnotes
- See Falchi et al. (2016), The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness, and research by the International Dark-Sky Association.
- Cf. Adorno & Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), on the entanglement of light with domination and rationality.
- John Tagg, The Burden of Representation (1988); Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire (1997).
- See Silvia Federici’s discussion of how darkness, witchcraft, and the body were historically demonised.
- T.J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene (2017), discusses the visual and ecological violence of extractivism.
- Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1990), introduces the concept of opacity as a right and form of resistance.
- See Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé (2005).
- My thoughts inspired by reading David Abrams book: The Spell of the Sensuous (1996).
- Some key texts and thinkers in this preparation: Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception), Bayo Akomolafe, Anna Tsing, and films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
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I’m pleased to share that I’ve been awarded the Artist Start grant from the Mondriaan Fund. This generous support enables me to further develop my artistic practice over the coming year—making space for new projects, deepening (this) ongoing research, and fostering new collaborations, both locally and internationally.
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In addition to this broader support, I would also like to express my sincere thanks to the other funding partners who have made it possible to invest in the equipment essential to the preparation of my new endeavours.
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Lastly, I’m deeply grateful to the dear colleagues and friends whose insight and encouragement continue to shape and inspire my work.
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