I. THE SUN BEHIND THE CLOUDS
I landed in Milan at two in the afternoon, under a dark sky. From the window I saw countless rays of light piercing the clouds, thin and insistent, as if someone had poked holes in a piece of cloth. The sun could not be seen, but it was there, behind.
We live in cloudy times. There is the war in Iran, the genocide of the Palestinian people, Russia’s war in Ukraine, the wars in Sudan and the Congo. There are uprisings and protests in many parts of the world. Stress has become a way of life, the planet is heating up and the sea is advancing on our shores. A whole generation, Generation Z, has grown up connected to everything and often without knowing what to hold on to. In Gandiol, young people are looking for spaces where they can build, and for a meaning to give their lives. They dream of raising a new world. Elsewhere, young people like them take to the streets. In Nepal, in 2025, Generation Z rose up, and one of the Pioneers, the collective Freedom Studio, accompanied them with art. In times like these, analysis is not enough. We need hope: not a naive hope, but the kind that is made by hand, with many tools. I also know what that hope cannot do. No song stops a bomb, and no workshop holds back the sea that is eating our beaches. Creativity is no substitute for peace or for a sea wall. But without it, it is hard even to imagine where to begin.
The gathering was called A Creativity Revival. Revival is a word with a long history: it is used for religious awakenings, for music that comes back, for peoples who rise again after a crisis. In my head I translated it as renacimiento, rebirth. I arrived wondering what needed to be reborn, and whether rebirth is not also an elegant way of saying that something in us had died along the way.
Milan is the city of design: things seem made to be looked at. BASE Milano is a former industrial site in the Tortona district, turned into a cultural centre. There, on 14 and 15 October, the Moleskine Foundation, which was celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, brought together the Creativity Pioneers. They are organisations from 76 countries that use art and culture as tools to change their communities. Hahatay has been one of them since 2025, after Laura Feal submitted our application. Laura works as a freelancer and coordinates Dekandoo, Hahatay’s artist residency; she also accompanies several cultural projects and artists in Senegal.
In the world of development aid, creativity usually comes last, like dessert: first the well, health and the school, and if anything is left over, a painting workshop. At Hahatay we learned the opposite. Creativity is not what you do once you have everything; it is what allows you to invent what is missing. Adama Sanneh, the Foundation’s director, wrote in the gathering’s magazine that we are living in “the age of creativity”. Not because it is new, but because it has become indispensable in a world where machines execute faster than anyone. He proposed that for every euro spent on artificial intelligence, two should be invested in local, human culture. Even so, that idea also makes me uneasy. If creativity serves to invent what is missing, someone might conclude that there is no need to provide what is missing. Admiring the ingenuity of those who work without resources should not become an excuse to leave them without.
On the first night, people who had come from so many countries sat down together for the first time. Until then I had been someone who had just landed; from that moment on I was one more part of the gathering.
II. THREE WORDS TO RETHINK THE PATH
Every year the Foundation chooses three words to guide its questions. This year they were time, disorientation and tenderness. Lwando Xaso, the South African writer and lawyer who curated the event, put it this way when she introduced it: that night, the words would be our guide. I liked the idea of words that do not explain but accompany. A guide does not walk for you; she walks beside you, or one step ahead, and every now and then turns around to see if you are still there.
There were also guides of flesh and blood, and much more. Maria Sebregondi, president of the Foundation, writes in the magazine that she wears an old gold watch with no numbers, only signs and two suns, one large and one small. She imagines that it does not measure hours, but the space we have to listen, to care and to act.
At a gathering full of “pioneers”, I asked myself who had walked before us. Being a pioneer sounds like opening new paths. But we almost always walk along trails that others opened, without anyone ever calling them pioneers. And a good guide, I thought later, is one you eventually no longer need to follow. Later I found that same idea in the magazine, in the story Lwando Xaso linked to a phrase by Octavia Butler: every attempt opened a path for whoever came next.
Walking behind others is also a question of time: arriving when the trail is already open, or opening it for those who have not yet arrived. The Greeks, Adama reminded us, had two words for time. Chronos is the time of the clock, of deadlines and quarterly reports. Kairos is the opportune moment, the crack through which something new comes in.
Maria Sebregondi writes that time is not possessed, it is cultivated. In our projects we tend to measure it in months and in reports. A grain of maize in the earth takes as long as it takes to sprout, and a community takes much longer to recognise itself in it. We see it every season at Jiikom Farm, Hahatay’s farm in Tabax Nite, where we grow food to feed ourselves. There, no one can bring the rain forward or shorten the time it takes a seed to become food. But which funder accepts that calendar? Reports ask for results at the end of every quarter, and the earth does not read reports.
Wednesday the 14th was the day of disorientation. That afternoon, at An Evening Under Other Suns, the philosopher Roberto Casati spoke. He studies how we get lost and how we find our way, and he has done fieldwork with Atlantic sailors, with reindeer herders in Siberia and in the Paris metro. The idea running through the gathering was that feeling lost is not always failure. Sometimes it is the sign that something new is trying to be born. As I listened, I thought of the sea at Gandiol. A compass tells you where north is, but not where the fish are, nor when the current changes, nor how to get back if the mist closes in on the coast. For that you need another way of finding your bearings: reading the water, the wind and the colour of the sky, and trusting what those who went out before you have learned.
The Egyptian artist Heba Y. Amin brings humour to disorientation. Through satire and absurdity, her work shows how many of the technologies we use every day still carry the legacies of colonial empires. She disorients you on purpose, so that you look differently at what you took for granted. I was also able to see another of her works, The Last Witness, which won the City of Nordhorn Art Prize in 2022.
At Hahatay we are now living a good kind of disorientation: we are imagining a hub at our artist residency, to run residency projects with artists from the region, inspired by the Creativity Social Change Hub in South Africa. I have not yet seen that place, because I have not yet been there. There is no blueprint: we have to learn. Perhaps that is what disorientation is: the moment when the map runs out and you have to keep walking anyway. And yet disorientation has a limit. A residency hub is not built with questions alone: you have to decide which artists to invite, with what money and for how long. When you decide for other people, getting lost stops being an experience that is yours alone and becomes a responsibility.
Of the three words, tenderness was the one I least expected to find at a philanthropy gathering. There, people usually talk about impact, scale and indicators. The African feminist poet and writer Jessica Horn explained it: she understands tenderness as a founding principle, the ground from which new possibilities can grow, not as an ornament.
The programme included some figures on the 254 Pioneers the fund has supported since 2021. Three out of four organisations have ten employees or fewer. Seventy-eight per cent have never, or almost never, received unrestricted money, that is, money someone gives you trusting that you will know how to use it. What weighs most on all of them is the same thing: finding funding and staying afloat. Some also spoke of exhaustion and loneliness. I recognised myself in those numbers. At Hahatay we are trying to stop depending on conventional development aid: we are looking for other spaces, other narratives, other relationships. We know that money will remain present in all our questions and all our actions, but we want it to stop being the one that decides them. Trusting that a community knows what it needs is also a form of tenderness.
Even so, I ask myself a question. If tenderness enters the vocabulary of funders, will it still be tenderness, or will it become one more box to tick in the report? “How many units of tenderness has your project generated this quarter?” The Foundation gives each Pioneer 5,000 euros for their organisation. It is a gesture of trust, and I am grateful for it. But it leaves me with three questions. Can there be real tenderness between those who give the money and those who need it, when only one of the two can afford to say no? Who decides what counts as tenderness: the community that practises it or the fund that finances it? And if one day that money stopped coming, what would be left of the relationship?
On the second day I fell ill. I do not know what it was; maybe covid, I never found out. I had no energy and could not join the tour of Milan I had signed up for. While the others were discovering the city, I went to the quiet room, a space of silence that had been set up for the gathering, and stayed there for as long as the visit lasted. Being in Milan without seeing Milan was my own disorientation. There, doing nothing, I got my strength back.
The tenderness I remember most was not in any hall. One night I had dinner with Catherine Dunga, Heba Y. Amin and Rosario Dawson in a small Chinese restaurant near BASE. We ate noodles and talked about the need for connection, but above all about care: about creating moments without noise, about holding each other. On the way back to BASE we took a photo. We were walking down the street laughing when, suddenly, we saw a phrase written on a wall: What if we find an excuse to talk again? We stood beneath it, together, and that photo was the best embrace of the night. The next day, Catherine asked me whether I had known Rosario before. I said no, and she told me she was a very famous actress.
Until then I had heard a great deal about tenderness and had felt it around a table. What was left was to try it with the body, as a group.
III. TRUSTING THE BODY
Thursday the 15th, the day of tenderness, began at nine with a workshop that I led. The idea had come from Katherine Peñaloza, an embodied leadership coach and integral coach. I had met her in Milan a few months earlier, and her way of being and of working made a deep impression on me. Since then we have built a good relationship, and it was she who suggested I run this workshop. I called it Dawn’s Secret, inspired by the Sufi tradition and the poetry of Rumi:
“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.”
Rumi, in the English version by Coleman Barks.
The idea was to awaken the body, centre the heart and clear the mind before the world started asking things of us. The theme was peace and love. We repeated it together as a zikr, the litany of the Sufi tradition, until the words stopped being words and became rhythm. Then we breathed in peace to carry it to every part of the body, and breathed out love to offer it to the world, with the breath alone. We ended with movement.
We stood in a circle, sleep still on our faces. At first each voice went its own way, shyly; little by little they came together into a single murmur. With the breathing, shoulders dropped and faces softened. When the movement came, the silence between one word and the next no longer made anyone uncomfortable.
Among the participants was Alioune Diagne, dancer, choreographer and founder of the international dance festival Duo Solo. I asked him to introduce himself without saying his name: to dance peace and love, and for the group to follow his movement. And so we did. At the end, I asked the group to stop following Alioune if they wished, and to become witnesses of his movement: no one was obliged to follow him. Alioune began slowly, and the group followed as best it could, copying each of his movements. When I said they could stop following him, some stood still, watching him, and others carried on a little longer. He did not stop: he kept dancing alone, in the middle of the circle, in front of everyone.
As I watched him dance, I thought how unlikely the scene was. I had met Alioune Diagne again. Meeting a Senegalese dancer in a room in Milan, at nine in the morning, breathing peace and love, has something of a joke of fate about it.
Catherine Dunga was there too, co-founder and director of the Kitambo Foundation. Kitambo celebrates Black cultures in Colombia and has woven a network between African and diaspora artists: a South–South bridge between Africa and Latin America. Catherine and I also met at other sessions, such as Mohsin’s. We were brought together by the Spanish language and by our journeys: she, of Congolese and Belgian origin, lives in Colombia, where we had friends and acquaintances in common. That brought us very close.
We were looking for kairos, the opportune moment, not clock time. That morning, for three quarters of an hour, we tried to step out of chronos. Although, to be honest, the workshop had a start time and an end time, and at 9:45 there was coffee. Even mystics respect the programme in Milan.
I also attended the session by Mohsin Mohi Ud Din, of MeWe International, Stories Are Living Things. He works with the body and with storytelling to heal, and has taken this work to refugee camps and to places such as Kashmir, Syria, Palestine and Lebanon. At one point we sat on the floor around a drawing of a body more than three metres long, full of lines and circles. We wrote and drew on it, and spoke to it as if it were our own. At times it seemed like the body of all humanity, with all its accumulated suffering, but also with our capacity, as human beings, to listen to it and to heal it. I was left thinking that the body holds what we have not been able to let go of, and that it can also be the place where repair begins.
IV. THE MAGIC OF LETTING GO
Not every rebirth begins with a party. Adama described how a new beginning, seen from the outside, often cannot be told apart from a loss. I prefer to speak of the magic of letting go.
For a year now I have been learning to let go of leadership: to take a step back and accompany others so that they can lead our organisation. It is not easy. Hands get used to holding on. Those others are the young people, the directors of our centres. What I find hardest is disappearing: stepping aside so that they become the new reference points for the community and the ones who work alongside it, without everything having to pass through me. That is why the end of the workshop moved me so much, when the group stopped following Alioune and he kept dancing alone. Letting go is not abandoning. It is trusting that the movement goes on without you.
Even so, I know that letting go does not erase everything. I am still the founder, the one who carries the history, the one who travels to Milan and the one who signs this chronicle. Handing over decisions is not the same as handing over visibility. Perhaps truly letting go also means this: that one day it will be someone else from Hahatay who comes to tell the story.
And there was Teere. In Wolof, teere means amulet. The same word also means book, as if a book were an object of protection. When I left to discover the world, my mother gave me an amulet. I was nineteen. It was a goat’s horn wrapped in red cloth, carrying the blessings of Pa Faye. I still keep it. Years later I wanted to make an artist’s book about the journey of my life and of Hahatay, with all the people who have helped to cultivate it. I directed it, and we made it with Laura Feal and many people from Hahatay. Teere is made of photographs by many artists, drawings, illustrations and phrases from colleagues, and it was sewn by our seamstress Yacine Dia and the other women of the women’s centre, with threads of different colours, sometimes left loose. It spans many years and many relationships. And yet, when a book like this enters a collection, it usually carries a single name. I directed it, but Teere was sewn by many hands. How many of them will appear on its library record?
It was exhibited among the notebooks of the Foundation’s Collection, which holds more than 1,600 works by artists, architects and writers from all over the world. Then it stayed in its library, in Milan. Before leaving I looked at it one last time. It was hard to turn around: it felt like leaving a piece of ourselves in Milan. Now our amulet protects other readers, far from home.
If there was letting go, there were also reunions. Alioune was not the only one.
The reunion was also with Amadou Fall Ba, with whom I had talked a great deal without ever having seen him: seeing him there, among all the other people, was like running into a relative in the street in a foreign country. You recognise him at once, even when he is wearing rapper’s clothes and big headphones. Amadou is a digital creator and the founder of the association Impact Senegal, and he has accompanied hundreds of young people.
On the last night, after the exhibition, there was a party in the courtyard at BASE. Pan-J played and bathed us in a rhythm of electronics and percussion. Then Valentino Barrioseta and Kikelomo Oludemi took over the decks. I danced a lot. The spiritual and magical power of the music, amapiano, afrobeat and hits from many corners of the world, together with the collective spirit of the people, wrapped us in a marvellous cloth. We danced, we sang, we laughed. We all became children again. I know that equality lasted as long as the music did. The next morning the programmes, the speakers and the funders would return, each to their place. The magic of the night showed us that another order is possible, even if only for a few hours.
V. OTHER SUNS
But the name of the gathering came from a far less festive place, and in Milan there were also moments to look it in the face.
The phrase that gave the gathering its name comes from the writer Octavia Butler: there is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns. At the opening of the unconference, Lwando Xaso linked it to the history of enslaved people who fled the plantations through secret networks of houses, barns and churches, the networks known in the United States as the Underground Railroad. No one escaped alone. Every attempt, whether it succeeded or failed, opened a path for whoever came next.
No one escapes alone, and no one creates alone. I saw that idea on a screen. At six in the evening, Jail Time Records, the documentary by Dione Roach and Steve Happi, was screened in the Ground Hall. It tells the story of a recording studio inside New Bell prison in Douala, Cameroon, where the inmates make music. This year it won at the Tribeca festival. Everything I had come to Milan looking for was there: creativity, music, history, the script. But what struck me most was its ability to transport us. From a room in Milan, the film took us into that prison, which is a hell, and showed us that there is also paradise inside that hell. The scene that marked me most was that of Transporteur, one of the singing inmates, kissing and joking with his wife.
In Milan I came across another recording studio, one that goes looking for voices where no one hears them. One afternoon, coming back from a lunch break of Italian pasta that called for a siesta, we were surprised by a woman rapping in her traditional clothes. Her luminous energy brought us back to life: we all stood up, formed circles and danced. The Indian rapper Krantinaari, founder of Wild Wild Women, the first all-women hip-hop collective in India, travels from village to village in a bus converted into a recording studio. She records the women’s songs before they disappear and pays them for their time, so that they know their voice has value. Many of these women had never been able to sing outside their homes. By recording themselves, they finally release a voice they had kept locked away.
None of the suns I saw in Milan shines alone. Each one is a small organisation, tired at times, in some corner of the world, carrying on with its work with no guarantee of results. Albie Sachs said it at the previous gathering, last June: we must keep creating not because the result is assured, but because creating is already a form of presence, of resistance and of faith.
When I landed I had seen those rays piercing the clouds over Milan and had thought that the sun was behind them. Days later I understood something more: the sun hidden behind the clouds was hiding other suns. Each ray was one of the people I had met: Alioune dancing alone, Katherine and her way of accompanying, Catherine welding a bridge between Africa and Colombia, Heba laughing at empires, Mohsin healing bodies, Transporteur laughing with his wife between the walls of New Bell.
In these times of war, of haste and of heat, having hope does not mean denying the clouds. It means knowing that there is light behind them, and that this light makes its way through the cracks we open together. Though sometimes I wonder whether it is enough. The organisations I met in Milan are tired, they live on funds they do not know will return, and the light they let in does not always reach those who need it most. How long can a crack be held open by goodwill alone?
Two weeks later I returned to Gandiol. The sky was blue and hot. At the Aminata Cultural Centre, the final of the Oscar des Vacances is taking place, the cultural programme that promotes dance, theatre and fashion, and where the village’s new talents in rap and mbalax are born. Hundreds of young people are waiting in the courtyard. The red carpet stretches to the centre, the lights are on, and Moustapha, the director of the cultural centre, and his team have put on their finest clothes. The DJ is warming up the crowd.
A few weeks ago we were dancing in the courtyard at BASE, in Milan. Tonight there is dancing in the courtyard of the Aminata, all of us under the same sky, in different places. The party is about to begin.
Mamadou Dia · Hahatay · 16 de octubre de 2026