first look: stages and installations by leopold banchini, DVS1, counterspace and more at horst

Horst arts & music 2025 takes over the asiat park in Vilvoorde

Held at Asiat Park in Vilvoorde, Belgium, Horst Arts & Music returns for its 11th edition with a program that combines architecture, visual art, and nightlife (find designboom’s previous coverage here). The 2025 edition spans a three-day festival and a summer-long exhibition titled There Will Come Soft Rains, involving over 20 commissions by artists, architects, and performers.

The site-specific program is built around collaboration. Horst works with artists and architects to design the stages and spaces for the festival and the summer expo, bringing architecture and fine art into contact with club culture like no other event in Europe. This year’s headline architecture project, Dark Skies, is co-designed by DVS1, Leopold Banchini, and Giona Bierens de Haan. The structure functions as a stage canopy and directional sound system, engineered to shape acoustic experience from above. Alongside it, new works by Counterspace, Atelier Fanelsa, Jean-Benoît Vétillard, YRD.Works, and Alter turn Asiat Park into a landscape of semi-permanent pavilions, canopies, and public interventions. During the festival, 12,000 ravers dance among these artworks. Some of these pieces will stay for years. Others vanish by autumn. All of them reshape how the space is used during the rave and after it.

all images by Eline Willaert, unless stated otherwise

Survival and memory shape There Will Come Soft Rains show

Meanwhile, the summer exhibition, There Will Come Soft Rains, named after Sara Teasdale’s 1918 poem, brings together artists like Marilyn Minter, Eddie Peake, Joshua Serafin, and Kenza Taleb Vandeput. Minter’s video installation lights up a cooling tower with hyper-glam feminist aesthetics. Peake stages The Pervert, a live performance with gold-painted dancers and a soundscape he builds in real time. Joshua Serafin turns a swamp-like setting into a participatory ritual. And Taleb Vandeput suspends a massive textile banner shaped in community workshops across Asiat Park’s antenna tower. The works play with ideas of survival, transformation, and shared memory.

There’s also a growing focus on legacy. Atelier Fanelsa’s rotunda roof is made from invasive plants processed on-site, knotweed, nettles, and elderberries, developed with TUM’s bioregional lab. Jean-Benoît Vétillard designs a new skatepark with Vilvoorde’s skating community. Alter and Baukreisel collaborate on a youth meeting place. And a metal cage by YRD.Works will be left to rust and rewild over five years.

Horst is a test site for new ways to share space, build community, and reimagine what cultural infrastructure can be