Black Triangle Festival

The Black Triangle Festival is a 24-hour curatorial experiment in imaginative transformation. It will take place on Saturday, August 30th from 10:00 a.m. to Sunday, August 31st at 10:00 a.m. Framed around the Winterslag terril in Genk, it will unfold as a dispersed circuit of artistic and poetic interventions. The festival coincides with a personal rite of passage — my 60th birthday — and marks a performative threshold in my doctoral research: urban transformation as a practice of imagination.

The title Black Triangle acknowledges complexity. Historically, it may have evoked stigma and resistance. Today, it becomes a sign of generative ambiguity — a refusal to settle into fixed meanings or conventional roles — in itself demonstrating that even oppressive signs can be reanimated into gestures of self-determination.

The terril, a black mountain formed from the residue of coal extraction, is both a literal and symbolic landmark. Privately owned, it is inaccessible in an official sense. And yet, despite these real-life limitations, it continues to fertilise our collective psyche. That is reflected in the multiple strands of artistic research that in recent years have been unfolding around its gravitational field.

At the core of my research underpinning this event lies a methodological gesture: to distill the terril's many forms and histories into a minimal diagram — a black triangle. From this abstraction emerge a set of culturally resonant images: mountain, island, mound, tomb, and ruin. These figures are not themes, but rather imaginative gateways. They guide a rhizomatic network of research inquiries that engage with the terril as a place, a dream, and a source. Both sediments and more evanescent echoes of these inquiries will be presented at the festival.

Invited guest contributions feature artists who have worked in the terril's shadow these past years. They work in a variety of media, from film, to ceramics, sculpture, and storytelling.

The festival does not “occupy” the terril in any conventional sense; rather, it orbits it, resonates with it, and illuminates new layers of its presence. This metaphorical occupation is a way of holding space for meanings that resist commodification, institutional appropriation, or erasure.

The festival is not a showcase. It is a perceptual field, a breathing circuit, a collective act of sensing. It offers no resolutions, only invitations. It is a 24-hour rêverie, an exploration of an ancestral songline, a sensing communion with a unique landscape. The terril is in private hands, yes. But no one can dissuade us from dreaming...

The Black Triangle Festival thus proposes a minor politics of presence: not to claim or conquer, but to reposition ourselves as agents in an unbounded practice of imagination. In a world of fences and boundaries, this is an act of occupying otherwise.