You can feel it: this is something else, unlike other festivals. In fact: Horst doesn’t feel like any other music festival. Where many festivals try to incorporate art into their terrains by commissioning art pieces and straightforwardly displaying them to dancers, Horst Arts & Music Festival weaves sonic and physical art together without visitors even realising they’re a part of the art manifestations. ‘The art is not just to be experienced visually’, explains Horst’s art curator.
Massive hammer energy
Is there actually a strobe swinging left to right from the roof of the indoor ‘EYES. EYES. baby.’ stage like a massive hammer? And is there really someone tugging on the rope to get the flashing lights in action when the beat drops? Of course there is. Jane Fitz and Carl H take us into a trippy hyperspace with them on the opening night of Horst Arts & Music Festival 2023 showing us that they have turned vinyl spinning into an art.
The indoor club in an industrial building where they play their mind-bending tunes is designed by Karel Burssens, a transdisciplinary artist who was trained as an architect and engineer. His ‘EYES. EYES. baby.’ stage sees dancers climb on top of different layers of scaffoldings, where thousands of people ascend and descent but never fall over, where people take their shirts off without being self-asserting, and where people are truly in the moment for a while. Power couple Mama Snake and Spekki Webu close their trippy, high-energy, and trancey techno set there with, in their own words, the ‘heartbreak karaoke closing’ mix of NRG’s ‘I Need Your Lovin’ by CJ Bolland, which feels like a collective wave of emotion soaring through the multi-leveled layout. It’s an example of what makes Horst Arts & Music stand out: the feeling of raw energy overtakes you, but at the same time it is clear that the festival’s organisation has thought everything through in utter detail, also in their art curation.
The stage fits the dancers like a glove; it’s hard to see where the people end and the design begins
The party as an artwork
The art part of Horst Arts & Music seems much more integrated into the sold-out festival this year than ever before. Do the 9.000 visitors even know that they are a part of the site-specific commissioned art pieces when they swarm through the trees this sunny weekend and find massive, metal butterflies and flowers with microphones inside? Do they know that the space where a sound system is drilling their ribcage, is designed by Mark Leckey, who won a Turner Prize in 2008? The man who’s literally hugging the speakers during DJ Lostboi (Malibu) (performed by a young boy playing her set so to fit her alias) doesn’t seem to realise he is hugging Leckey’s ‘roll pitch yaw - surge heave sway’ stage, which exhibits popular culture in an immersive way.
Of course, there will always be a group of visitors who just attend for the music, but it’s fair to say that even though they may not actively search for art installations, they definitely are taking part in it. Take the almost shapeless and brutal work ‘HUT’ by Marc Leschelier as an example, designed as an experiment to uplift architecture's desire for functionality, which has dancers explore the installation and make it what they want it to be. The construction serves as a welcome piece of quiet for some, just metres away from the new, bold, and absolutely banging ‘State Of Play’ stage, where DJs like Merve and KI/KI bring out the untamable energy of the clubbers on Friday. The festival borders on actual chaos and madness at moments.
This also happens when Job Jobse closes off the ‘State Of Play’ stage on the Sunday, or when Jennifer Loveless creates waves of euphoria with her feisty acid belters. The big difference with other festivals is that the energy never shifts into an aggressive territory or to a place where it doesn’t feel safe anymore. Instead, the stage design by the young collective Stand Van Zaken gives you the feeling like you’re at a massive block party, only this time with fountains surrounding you, flashing lights from the abandoned building behind you, and constructions to climb on, to catch a glimpse of the selector at turn. The stage fits the dancers like a glove; it’s hard to see where the people end and the design begins.
The curator’s perspective
Something quite the opposite is happening simultaneously: groups of people gather to participate in the guided art tours Horst provides every hour. They flock through the festival site in a calm and captivated fashion. You’d assume the guides would have a hard time attracting people dedicated enough to spend an hour on a journey through all of the art installations on the terrain, but that’s not in the slightest bit true. The English-spoken guided tour we took on the sunny Saturday afternoon is made up of almost sixty people, all quiet when they need to be.
Their dedication shows us that not all festival visitors come to the old military base ‘Asiat’ in Vilvoorde just to party; the possibility to combine this with the art exposition called ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ draws people in, too. The main themes of the exposition are an ode to DIY culture, unregulated forms of community life, and disobedience and disruption. Additionally, all the installations tap into the future potential of the terrain.
This also happens when Job Jobse closes off the ‘State Of Play’ stage on the Sunday, or when Jennifer Loveless creates waves of euphoria with her feisty acid belters. The big difference with other festivals is that the energy never shifts into an aggressive territory or to a place where it doesn’t feel safe anymore. Instead, the stage design by the young collective Stand Van Zaken gives you the feeling like you’re at a massive block party, only this time with fountains surrounding you, flashing lights from the abandoned building behind you, and constructions to climb on, to catch a glimpse of the selector at turn. The stage fits the dancers like a glove; it’s hard to see where the people end and the design begins.
The curator’s perspective
Something quite the opposite is happening simultaneously: groups of people gather to participate in the guided art tours Horst provides every hour. They flock through the festival site in a calm and captivated fashion. You’d assume the guides would have a hard time attracting people dedicated enough to spend an hour on a journey through all of the art installations on the terrain, but that’s not in the slightest bit true. The English-spoken guided tour we took on the sunny Saturday afternoon is made up of almost sixty people, all quiet when they need to be.
Their dedication shows us that not all festival visitors come to the old military base ‘Asiat’ in Vilvoorde just to party; the possibility to combine this with the art exposition called ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ draws people in, too. The main themes of the exposition are an ode to DIY culture, unregulated forms of community life, and disobedience and disruption. Additionally, all the installations tap into the future potential of the terrain.
One of the highlights is Sharon van Overmeiren’s large-scale totem-like installation ‘Capricious Swirl’ located at the central square of the festival site, for which she takes references from different religions, cultures, and periods of times and blends the many communities behind them. The installation is semi-permanent and has an adiabatic cooling system built into its ceramics, much like the ancient Egyptians would use. She created the piece together with the Institute of Societal Warmth. ‘Capricious Swirl’ cools the environment, which shows how much the artist has thought about what art can do for its surroundings instead of it solely being functional, just like how Horst turns space into a hybrid playground.
Evelyn Simons runs the visual arts and performance programming at Horst. She explains what she searches for in artists when she curates the annual exposition. The cultural significance of a piece, just like with ‘Capricious Swirl’, is most important to her. She expresses that the art programme is not a side programme, but stands autonomously while being in conversation with the musical side of the festival. ‘The art is not just to be experienced visually. I'm very drawn to artists that are open to site-specific commissions and don’t see a collaboration of a limitation to their artistic freedom.’ She likes artists who live and breathe ‘rave culture’, but she doesn’t want to go meta and curate an exhibition on nightlife itself. ‘That often results in, to me, very dead-like experiences. I don't want to approach rave culture from an academic or theoretical point of view. We look for artists who share the same quest for freedom that you find in rave and nightlife ever since I started working here, even if they talk about particular political cases or social anecdotes. This shared ambition or urge of nightlife connects many creatives in the underground. So it's more about looking for a connection between people for me, no matter what artistic discipline they're working in.’
We look for artists who share the same quest for freedom that you find in rave and nightlife
Power structures and bringing them down
It’s Simons’ last year as curator at Horst. She reflects on five years curating the art side of the festival: ‘When I arrived here, it looked like a ruin of the old masculine power left by the military, which left me thinking about power structures that are so outdated. And what was beautiful here was that nature had completely taken over this terrain. So you have these flowers and butterflies everywhere, giving this new-found softness. This year, because it's my last, I really wanted to make sure that the symbiosis between the arts and the music would be far advanced, and that we would allow for artworks to only exist during the festival, where we usually ask them to build something that stays in Asiat Park after. So, there are a lot of performances this year. The art comes alive.’
An example of this is Elisa Giardina Papa’s film ‘U Scantu: A Disorderly Tale’, a modern interpretation of the myth of the ‘donne di fora (women from the outside and beside themselves)’ in Sicily. She focuses on female solidarity, community, and civil disobedience with a piece that questions the criminalisation of women accused of being a ‘donne di fora’ in the 16th and 17th centuries. Admittedly, it’s quite the change from the DJ mayhem that happens down the path, but this twelve-minute film challenges festival goers to think about power structures, which is a hot topic in the music and arts industry.
‘Weren’t there race cars here just now?’
When visitors drift to the concrete oasis between the Le Soleil Rouge and Vesshcell stages, they find another work about prejudice. Interdisciplinary artist Joe Namy’s installation questions pre-assumptions about subwoofer culture. Neon-coloured tuners with revving engines, gigantic subwoofers in the doors and trunks, and extravagant spoilers on the back, appear out of nowhere once every hour on the Friday and Saturday of Horst. They blast gabber, dubstep, and drum and bass in unison, and people go mental when they dance around the fences surrounding the cars. It’s like a burst of energy, only for ten minutes.
‘But wait, weren’t there race cars here just now?’, someone asks their friend. He was right. With the same speed the cars were in place and started blasting tunes in the ‘streets’ of Horst, they disappeared again, leaving the site like nothing had happened there. Joe Namy’s ‘The 10th Automobile’ is a first for the artist, who takes their ongoing tuners project to a music festival. ‘I thought it could be a really interesting way to mess with the festival. The manifestation is not something that you normally would experience within a festival context’, Namy explains.
The artist sees similarities between ‘sound culture’ and ‘street culture’, but also sees how different the two worlds are. “Normally, I’d do these performances in public spaces like in front of the Parliament building in Toronto to create access to the sound system culture for people from different worlds. A lot of my work deals with the politics of music. Many people have very specific ideas of the types of people who have these sound systems; it’s a very aggressive subculture. The main thought behind this project is to allow people to get close to these sounds and to speak with the people who own the tuners if they want to, so they experience it on an intimate level. Hopefully, the performance changed their minds about subwoofer culture.’
Namy comes from Detroit, where the artist was used to seeing these types of cars. When they moved to Beirut, they found the same culture in a different city: ‘Guys would just park in front of the corniche, play their music really loud, pump up their systems, and hang out. It’s just like in Detroit, which I didn’t know before I moved there. That's what got me thinking. Sometimes they would compete to see who had the loudest subwoofers, and I was like, what if they were all connected? It would be such an amazing experience to bring them together and make it a concert. And we finally made it happen.’
Synthesis in sound
The experiment of weaving worlds together has clearly worked for Namy at Horst, a theme that repeatedly recurred during the three days of the festival near Brussels. Not just in art but also in music, blasting through high-quality sound systems, as well. For instance, when Jerrau played his breakbeat combined with bubbling on the charming ‘Le Soleil Rouge’ stage designed by BRUTHER on Saturday. The ‘red sun’ reflected the rays of sunshine on dancers, almost like a mirror into the sky. What’s up and what’s down? You tell us. Even trailblazing heavyweights like dBridge & Donato Dozzy brought different worlds together by playing hardcore and gabber in their normally drum and bass-stuffed set. Dancers closing off the spacey and intimate Moon Ra stage designed by Leopold Banchini and curated by Kiosk Radio had a gabber edit of Martin Garrix’ hit track ‘Animals’ (that had to be at least 160 BPM or higher) coming their way before they were sent home.
The crowds at Horst Arts & Music Festival 2023 may or may not have noticed, but they were part of a set of experiments this weekend, of something different. This is a place where experiment and the freedom of rave culture are incorporated into everything you see, hear, or feel. It’s not an electronic music festival that wants you to look at art, but subtly invites you to become part of it.
