Dialoghaus Hamburg

As a social-franchise format, Dialog im Dunkeln takes visitors into a deliberately altered sensory reality; it is part of a series of related formats such as Dialog im Stillen and Dialog mit der Zeit. The idea goes back to Andreas Heinecke. Since its founding in 1988, the exhibition has been shown in more than 30 countries and over 130 cities and has attracted more than 9 million visitors. The projects have also created around 9,000 job opportunities for blind and visually impaired people.

In completely darkened rooms, blind people guide visitor groups through reconstructed everyday scenes. Visitors encounter, for example, a park, an urban landscape, or a bar, and perceive smells, wind, changes in temperature, sounds, and different surfaces. The core of the concept is a role reversal: blind guides take responsibility for orientation and lead sighted visitors out of their habitual patterns of perception.

The project’s starting point was a professional situation involving the founder, which in 1988 led to the development of training for a colleague who had become blind. Practical experiments in the dark followed the idea; in 1989 the first Dialog im Dunkeln opened in Frankfurt. After further exhibition projects in Europe, the first permanent presentation was established in Hamburg in 2000.