There Will Come Soft Rains

In 2025, we more than ever prioritised artists with substance over visibility, doubling down on rich and challenging music within a scene increasingly driven by speed and easy consumption. Staying true to our ethos, Horst 2025 once again carved out space for in-depth (inter)national collaborations, including Kiosk Radio joining forces with The Lot Radio to host Moon Ra. Resident Advisor also returned, curating this year’s Vesshcell roundabout in a renewed form, where pop-oriented edits gave way to more live and niche acts from the undercurrent.

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A growing, living Asiat Park

We placed an even stronger emphasis on our relationship with Asiat Park, treating the site not merely as a backdrop for the artistic programme but as an evolving environment in its own right. Over recent years, we've been gradually developing this former industrial terrain into a functioning and growing urban area. This ongoing process formed the context for the festival’s artistic programme and provided the setting for a newly introduced, dynamic summer exhibition.

Visitors were encouraged to look beyond the obvious and move past first impressions. Throughout Asiat Park, hidden nooks and unexpected dead ends revealed themselves as active spaces, shaped through exploration and reuse. By turning the site inside out and working with what lies beneath, the festival unfolded as a landscape where overlooked corners became part of the experience.

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Furthermore, a newly incorporated stretch of terrain along the waterfront was added to Asiat Park, creating an expanded area of open space that became a significant part of the site’s evolving landscape. The most notable projects in this area was 'Dark Skies', a large-scale sound installation designed by architects Leopold Banchini and Giona Bierens de Haan in collaboration with DJ and producer DVS1. The work took the form of a suspended sonic canopy — a roof of sound constructed from hundreds of speakers that defined a precise, democratic space for bodies meeting in sound, with no one positioned more than a few metres from the sound source:

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Placemaking through art and architecture

At the heart of the 2025 art programme was the Horst Expo There Will Come Soft Rains, a wide-ranging exhibition of installations and site-specific interventions that examined cycles of renewal and adaptation. Many of these works remain embedded in the site today. Participating artists included Eddie Peake, Marilyn Minter, Joshua Serafin, and Kenza Taleb Vandeput, each presenting new, multi-layered works that probed intersections of art, identity, and community-building. The exhibition’s themes were further echoed through a series of architectural interventions, including a new semi-permanent stage co-designed by DJ and producer DVS1 alongside architect Leopold Banchini, as well as site-specific contributions by Atelier Fanelsa, Jean-Benoît Vétillard, Alter & Baukreisel, and others.

Drawing inspiration from Sara Teasdale’s 1918 poem on nature’s resilience amid destruction, There Will Come Soft Rains reflected on humanity’s capacity to move beyond conflict toward harmony and growth. Unforeseen changes led the exhibition to expand into a newly unlocked area of Asiat Park, physically manifesting ideas of adaptation and flourishing in the face of adversity.

Beneath the surface, beyond the algorithm

The music programme in 2025 foregrounded artists and sounds that often remain underrepresented in local contexts, placing emphasis on depth, experimentation, and artistic trajectories rather than immediacy or visibility. Within a landscape increasingly shaped by speed and easily consumable formats, the programme prioritised complex musical languages, long-form approaches, and practices rooted in cultural exchange, research, and scene-building.

MAKADSI bridged Arab and North American influences within the For All Queens! hosting, while BADSISTA and Verraco highlighted contemporary club scenes from Brazil and Colombia. From Hong Kong, gyrofield reworked IDM through a distinct, forward-looking lens. These perspectives were part of a broader commitment to presenting rich, challenging music beyond dominant trends.

DVS1 curated (and co-designed) an entirely new stage, introducing the dub techno collective Generations in Sync (DJ Pete, Erik Jabari, Moritz von Oswald), alongside a live set by Surgeon, following performances by JakoJako and GiGi FM. The programme was further shaped by a strong presence of Belgium’s underground, including Boudewijn Ericx, Antwerp-based SRD (Sound Running Deep), dub selector Elisethere, and Ghent artists gguusst and Gaiko, among many, many others.

Across the weekend, the lineup also featured a series of widely discussed back-to-back sets, some of which took place for the first time. These included Erol Alkan alongside Palms Trax, Polygonia with Steffi, Hannah Holland joined by Josh Caffé, Horst resident AliA meeting Mia Koden, and a rare collaboration between DJ Stingray 313 and Helena Hauff.

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Collective creation at the core

None of the activities that shaped Horst in 2025, from the festival and summer exhibition to the continued development of the renewed club, would have been possible without the sustained commitment of our volunteers and the Atelier programme. Throughout the year, the Ateliers were further deepened as a structural way of working, forming the backbone of both production and long-term site development. More than a support system, they remained central to how Horst operates: as a collective practice built on shared labour, care, and continuity.