From February 6 to 8, 2026, IAAC – Advanced Architecture Barcelona takes part in Llum BCN 2026 with Underlight, a light installation developed and led by the Master in Design for Emergent Futures in collaboration with Fab Lab Barcelona and ELISAVA.
The project is curated by Mario Santamaría and developed by a group of 25 students, positioning design, technology and urban exploration at the centre of one of Barcelona’s most significant public festivals, held this year in the context of the World Capital of Architecture 2026.
The project
Underlight brings the Llum festival from the surface of Poblenou to just a few centimeters beneath our feet, introducing the spectacle of light into the underground world of gas, water, electricity, and internet infrastructures. Through a fictional company and the visual language of construction: metal structures, safety barriers, cables, screens, and industrial lighting. The installation presents what appears to be a live underground inspection, broadcast by a small robot exploring the city’s buried infrastructures.
The installation shifts the luminous phenomenon to the material infrastructure that sustains it, constructing the illusion of a real-time descent beneath the public space. Through light, movement, and carefully choreographed imagery, Underlight proposes a form of non-spectacular spectacle, drawing on techniques developed for urban maintenance and public works.
Referencing Poblenou’s industrial past and infrastructures such as the historic Iris power station, the project invites the public to reflect on what lies hidden beneath the city and on how urban space is continuously shaped by invisible processes.
About the curator
Mario Santamaría is a Barcelona-based visual artist working across installation, photography, video and performance. In 2018 he founded Internet Tour, a project that operates as a tour operator exploring the physical infrastructures of the internet. His work has been shown internationally at institutions including ZKM Karlsruhe, C/O Berlin, MACBA, Aksioma Ljubljana and Arebyte London. He also teaches at ELISAVA and has been invited to institutions such as UC Berkeley, HSLU Luzern, The New School and Trinity College Dublin.
Underlight is part of Llum BCN 2026 and is open to the public.
Visit the installation in Carrer de Castella, 4.
