In April 2026 I presented FOMO at BASE Milano during Milano Design Week — my first independent project as a designer and emerging artist. It was an honour, and it was an honour above all because of where I was.
BASE is one of the few places in Milan that still resists the logic of spectacle, and that builds a cultural programme attentive to what society actually needs to think about. Being part of HELLO DARKNESS, the public programme curated by BASE, meant being among voices that take darkness, opacity and silence seriously, as conditions from which something can still grow.
During those seven days I met artists and designers whose work moved me. They were asking hard questions about colonial histories, climate, hospitality, ecological knowledge, the limits of design. What stayed with me, beyond their projects, was learning that almost none of them lives from this work. They build it at night, on weekends, in whatever time they can carve out from the jobs that pay their rent. They do it because they believe in it.
Beams of Light comes from a simple refusal: I did not want this conversation to end on the last day of Milano Design Week, in one city, in one week. The works gathered here interrupt, ask, propose. They deserve to travel, to meet other audiences, to keep generating thought.
This is why we are here in Amsterdam, in a context far from Milan and from the spectacle of the Design Week, hosted in a space that is not a fair but a gallery with its own cultural voice.
The selection is personal. These are projects whose research and social impact struck me deeply, and that I believed could speak meaningfully to Amsterdam. There were others I would have loved to include, and that for organisational reasons or scheduling could not be part of this edition. That absence is part of what this exhibition is — a fragment, not a totality.
In the spirit of Ursula K. Le Guin's carrying bag theory, I do not think a curator's role is to deliver answers. It is to gather fragments and pass them on.
This edition would not have existed without Alexis Mardapittas and Hans Lensvelt, who believed in the project from the first conversation and who made their space available to the artists at no cost. The generosity of that gesture is what made everything else possible.
