Theo Triantafyllidis
Meanwhile

In collaboration with TICK TACK, Horst Arts & Music reactivates the iconic, yet elusive, cooling towers after four years through a custom-made video projection by the acclaimed digital artist Theo Triantafyllidis (b. Athens, 1988). From Thursday, May 9th to Saturday, May 11th, as from Sunset, the festival site of Horst (Asiat Park, Vilvoorde) will be the setting for an unprecedented open-air digital art presentation.

Engie Electrabel’s cooling towers have long served as an industrial backdrop for the festival and a familiar landmark for its 40k+ annual visitors. Their impressive scale and close proximity make them a serene fixture and a symbolic anchor point of the festival. This year, TICK TACK collaborates with artist Theo Triantafyllidis to transform the right cooling tower into an unprecedentedly dynamic stage. Beam Inc., an Antwerp-based partner specializing in public projections, will utilize 7 state-of-the-art projectors, each boasting 50,000 lumens, to illuminate the entire architectural structure from top to bottom for Theo Triantafyllidis’s digital art performance.

Interacting with the “Spirit of Place” of the festival grounds and projected in large scale on the iconic cooling tower, Theo Triantafyllidis’s exhibition offers a glimpse into synthetic ecosystems and performative systems running in parallel. These works tell stories of interspecies communication and human absence, curated to reflect the festival’s overall theme: ‘To have or to hold’. This theme explores the tension between human development and ecological succession, addressing questions of ownership, preservation, and the relationship between nature and infrastructure. Triantafyllidis’s work seamlessly fits, adding new layers to this theme, and offers a thought-provoking exploration of these complex dynamics within the context of the festival’s unique environment.

Meanwhile is a monumental videoscreening by Theo Triantafyllidis, a curated selection featuring excerpts from the video works BugSim (Pheromone Spa), 2022, Ritual, 2020, Seamless, 2017, How To Everything, 2016 and Still Life With Yumyums, 2016. It offers a unique exploration of the site’s spirit and has been carefully curated for this occasion. Projected onto one of the iconic cooling towers, Theo Triantafyllidis’ work serves not only as a visual spectacle but also as a catalyst for reflection on the intersection of art, environment, and human interaction. Through Triantafyllidis’ exclusive performative system, tailored specifically for the festival, viewers are transported into a realm where the boundaries between nature and human intervention blur. His work invites contemplation on the delicate balance between human development and ecological succession, echoing the exhibition’s overarching theme.

Text by slimetech.org and horstartsandmusic.com