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If a soprano can shatter glass, Aérea Negrot’s voice could risk melting the crystal palace. This is not the first time Boudry and Lorenz collaborated with the performer, who passed away in 2023. In an earlier collaboration, Silent (2016), the vocalist refuses to sing for 4.33 minutes, only to break into an impassioned song once she is offstage, far from the array of microphones that had initially surrounded her. Deploying silence as a technique of refusal resonates with the theme of the right to opacity. Silent separates platform and performer, while the artists reverse the gesture in Nest, blurring Negrot into our surroundings. As her voice folds into the fog, her diffused presence veils the song in a haunting enigma.

El Cristal Es Mi Piel gives voice to the colonial past of the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid. Constructed in 1887 for the Exposición de las Filipinas, the crystal palace symbolises the colonial gaze of observation and control. The imperial exhibition was in turn inspired by the Wereldtentoonstelling in Amsterdam in 1883, where people from the Dutch colonies were exhibited in fabricated settlements.

How should one interpret Negrot’s words from this context? With the opening line ‘watch me, come so close,’ she builds the tension between transparency and right to opacity. Being seen becomes of urgent democratic relevance for black and trans people like Negrot herself. However, from the perspective of the West’s demand for transparency, being seen also carries a darker side, related to the urge to understand the other. Besides military might, Europe’s imperial ventures were carried out with recordkeepers, photographers, scientists, and botanists. Here, understanding becomes not a desire for entanglement so much as for domination, which is more apparent in the Dutch word begrijpen, which implies ‘grasping’

The role that museums have played in these knowledge-gathering practices is never made explicit at Nest. This is especially remarkable given that Boudry and Lorenz draw on the rich postcolonial framework of Édouard Glissant’s book Poetics of Relation. While the inclusion of additional works lies beyond the scope of Nest’s solo exhibition, a comparison of artistic practices that engage Glissant’s discussion of transparency and opacity in the context of exhibiting art and culture might gesture towards more nuanced roads untaken.

Take for instance how these notions are embedded in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s and Stephanie Syjuco’s approaches to rethink the photographic archive of ethnographic museums. On the cover of Azoulay’s book Potential History (2019), she folded a picture to see the subjects without the shadow of their colonizers, therefore resisting the impulse to ontologize the oppressed as perpetual casualties. Alternatively, in Block Out the Sun (2019), Syjuco’s hands offer the subjects of ethnographic photographs a belated right to opacity. While both aim to reinscribe people with an agency that the colonial gaze stripped away from them, the difference in interventions reveals the ambivalence of seeing.

Rather than adopting Glissant’s theory to engage which such deeper roots of colonialism, Boudry and Lorenz take the concept to contextualise El Cristal Es Mi Piel in a somewhat idealised conception of the world after dark. The ‘right to opacity’ translates well to how nocturnal settings offer an escape from various forms of spatial marginalisation, whether home, work, or public. Fog Is My Drug however, does little to nuance the joyful and consensual levelling of social structure that is supposed to arise in nightcultures anonymous crowds. Despite efforts to maintain a safe space, the club is undeniably striated by its own hierarchies of scene-specific capital, such as attractiveness, fashion, age, and guestlists, as well as more harmful sexual and substance abuse. A local example showing that clubs are not exempt from challenges around diversity and inclusion is the case of Amsterdam club De School, whose institutional racism was brought to light during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

Still, it takes only one arduous Museumnacht of (social) networking to understand the appeal of the rave’s capacity to enact the fantasy, if not always the praxis, of loosening normative social bonds. Leaving that praxis to the neighbours, Nest pulls the fantasy outside. The ‘abstract club’ provides an intriguing bridge between artwork and raver, where ‘the right to opacity’ becomes a means to widen the gap between the unravelling of initial social ties and fastening new ones. Placed in this context, the smoke-machines in Boudry and Lorenz’s installation do not blur difference so much as leave it intact. When Negrot disappears into the misty Palacio de Cristal for the last time, Fog Is My Drug leaves the visitor reflecting on the potential of a togetherness that exists before, or beyond, begrijpen. One that inverts the colonial gaze, where fog clears the way.

Though at risks of reductively instrumentalizing and idealizing notions of stranger sociability into a vision of the ‘abstract club’ that borders on the utopian, Boudry and Lorenz’s imagination of alternative forms of solidarity has critical relevance and positive valences today. One might be tempted to add to this utopia a wish that The Hague’s politicians take a transformative trip to the docks – to learn to love the fog. Yet perhaps more fittingly, we might do as Nest does, open our doors to the neighbours, and shake off the fear of what is different. For when faced with the unfamiliar, ravers have long known, the best approach is to start dancing.