At Art Basel, Zegna Is Shining a Light on What’s Underwater

Most fashion brands at Art Basel go to be seen. Zegna has other priorities, specifically the Philippine seabed. 

The house has announced the 2026 VISIBLE Situated Fellowship, awarded this year to GOODLand, an artistic and community platform founded in 2020 by artist Martha Atienza on Bantayan Island in the Philippines. The project works with fisherpeople, farmers, and local communities to protect the coastal ecosystems of the Philippine archipelago, one of the regions most exposed to super-typhoons and climate instability. At the centre of it is a simple but urgent idea, the seabed is an underwater forest, and it needs protecting.

The fellowship will fund rechargeable flashlight systems to reduce pollution caused by compressor diving, and regular coastal and underwater clean-up programmes.

VISIBLE, the initiative behind the fellowship, has been running since 2010 in partnership with Fondazione Zegna and Cittadellarte, founded by artist Michelangelo Pistoletto. It backs art that operates outside the gallery and is instead embedded in communities, unfolding over time, being useful rather than decorative. Zegna joined as a partner in 2024, and the connection between the two is less corporate than it sounds. Founder Ermenegildo Zegna spent the 1930s planting more than half a million trees in the Biella Alps to transform the surrounding landscape into a living ecosystem. The logic is the same, it’s just nearly a century apart.

As VISIBLE puts it, art shouldn’t ask what it can represent. It should ask what it can sustain.