LABIOMISTA, an evolving work of art on the mix of life
LABIOMISTA is an atypical project, emerging from a remarkable collaboration between an artist, Koen Vanmechelen, and a city, Genk. LA-BIO-MISTA, a self-invented word that points to life in all its mixed and variegated glory, is conceived by Vanmechelen as a permanent and evolving work of art. It represents humanity, nature and the relationship between both. The site weaves together culture, heritage, public park, contemporary architecture and ‘wild’ nature.
Local
Belgium
Genk, Limburg
Mainly urban
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
2019-07-01
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): City of Genk Type of organisation: Public authority (European/national/regional/local) First name of representative: Wim Last name of representative: Dries Gender: Male Nationality: Belgium Function: city mayor Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Stadsplein 1 Town: Genk Postal code: 3600 Country: Belgium Direct Tel:+32 476 69 90 03 E-mail:wim.dries@Genk.be Website:http://www.genk.be
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Yes
New European Bauhaus or European Commission websites
LABIOMISTA is an atypical project, emerging from a remarkable collaboration between an artist, Koen Vanmechelen, and a city, Genk (BE). An oasis in the city, where the relationship between humans and the rest of nature is contemplated and communicated. Headlined by The Guardian as ‘Belgians alternative natural history museum – the stuff of Dreams’, LABIOMISTA, is conceived by Vanmechelen as a permanent and evolving work of art. It weaves together culture, heritage, public park, contemporary architecture and ‘wild’ nature to tell the story of duality, of the interconnectedness of nature and culture, of fertility and survival. Through the lens and language of art, it positions diversity as the basis for resilience in both society and ecosystems and poses the fundamental question: ‘Where exactly is the outer limit of human intervention, and when do we cross it?’
LABIOMISTA, which means “the mix of life”, is located on 24 ha of land and features three distinct but interrelated components: villa, studio and park , each one representing a different identity: humans, nature, and the interplay and tension between them. As visitors enter this world, a new exploration between man and nature begins. A search for a new, more sustainable balance.The presence of animals and art build a narrative of shared destiny between human and animal. The land, previously used for mining and later housed a zoo, has been cleared of prior man-made elements and vegetation has been allowed to regrow naturally, with little human intervention. A network of hiking trails guides visitors from the tamed/domesticated world to a rugged, untouched and untamed one. In the rear part, wilderness reigns: ‘Protected Paradise’ is an expansive plain bordering water and surrounded by trees – and by quiet. It is a transition zone to the Hoge Kempen National Park. Galloways graze freely and large stork’s nests invite birds to come and make their life here. All is connected in a great network of biodiversity.
Art
Nature
Community
Diversity
Fertility
To advance sustainability on a grand scale, a change in mindsets is needed. LABIOMISTA uses the transformational power of art to encourage debate, foster collaboration, drive change and develop new, unprecedented and uniquely different solutions. Its ultimate goal is to discover how to make the world an inhabitable place, with diversity as the basis for all evolution.
A desolated mining site and defunct zoo is transformed into an immense park with great architecture, natural landscape installations, artworks, and animals of the most disparate species. A place for the public to connect with the natural world and with each other. Positioned at the crossroads of nature and city, industry and community, 24 ha of built-up land have been repurposed as ‘ode to biocultural diversity’. The park plays an important role in fostering discussions about human and animal relationships including issues around how we broadly view animals, evolution, adaptation, domestication, and the impact of these ideas on diversity. From the relationship established with animals, man can draw decisive answers to the problems of adaptation and survival. LABIOMISTA’s Open University of Diversity (OpUnDi) organises events, conferences and community projects on the themes of LABIOMISTA: Between Jungle and Civilisation, Black Stork Baby, Science day, Day of the park, The Unthinkable Experiment, etc. These offer new opportunities to engage innovators, entrepreneurs, creatives, scientists, and the public in a collaborative effort to shift common perceptions of the environment, animals, and the human connection to both.
LABIOMISTA exemplifies how art can bring people closer to nature, engage broader and more diverse audiences in biocultural diversity and ultimately lead to neighbourhood regeneration. It also offers practical examples of how different partners can collaborate on sustainability enhancing projects.
The aesthetic engagement of LABIOMISTA aims to evoke wonderment in the diversity of life, visualise interconnectivity of culture and nature, and envision new possibilities for the future in which the useful can coexist with the beautiful. It proposes a new sense of aesthetics for regeneration of vulnerable neighbourhoods. One that captures places' unique qualities, history and potential, generates a sense of belonging, safeguards cultural heritage, while at the same time restoring a more natural balance of co-existence.
LABIOMISTA is set up as a universe with a powerful emotional impact, a story of phantasies and intuitions, studies and inventions, encounters and collaborations. Contemporary art, heritage, nature, and architecture combine to tell a story of men and animals and of the ever-changing beauty of forms, as much in art as in nature. The animals in the park, which play an essential inspirational role in the artist’s work, represent the diversity that typifies our world. They roam freely through most of the compounds, allowing them to develop their own hierarchical structures and natural ecosystems.
LABIOMISTA demonstrates the value of creating something uniquely different. With art as its enabler and platform, it rebels against traditional monistic classifications, proposing authentic beauty as oxygen for life and diversity as the basis for all evolution. Unique in its approach, LABIOMISTA positions (living) art installations embedded in natural environments as sources of implicit knowledge, generators of novel useful ideas, to be further discovered and tested through the reasoning of science or through practical application by the communities.
LABIOMISTA aims to involve the widest possible range of people in its development and operations. Its location, in one of the most diverse and challenging areas of the city, positions the project deep in the more vulnerable communities of the city. After the closure of the mine and later zoo, this once green area was left economically and ecologically scarred. The artist was drawn to this ‘wounded place’. With LABIOMISTA he set out to regenerate and re-include this neighbourhood community and its biocultural heritage into the city fabric. Local community involvement has been constant in the execution and operation of the site.
To maximize accessibility, LABIOMISTA is free to children under the age of 18 and to all citizens of the city of Genk. For other visitors, an affordable entrance fee is maintained with a standard ticket costing 10 euros. The site is fully accessible for wheelchairs. Audiotours, information boards and educational programs are available in multiple languages. (NL, ENG, FR, DU). There is also an audio guide for kids. Projects like LaMouseion and Cosmogolem have a specific focus on inclusion of youth and children. To avoid socio-economic barriers, these projects are free of charge for participants.
Inclusion is also an important element in the site's daily operations. To care for the animals, LABIOMISTA collaborates with local care-giving organisations who help vulnerable groups increase their self-confidence and opportunities. People with a disability, who are themselves in need of care are appointed as the ‘conservators’ of the park and the animals. In turn, they become the care-givers. In partnership with the non-profit organization De RegenbOog, collaborations were developed with several schools in the region. Yearly, on average, 35-40 youngsters with disabilities take on the role of ‘conservator’.
LABIOMISTA is located in a neighbourhood with considerable socioeconomic challenges and limited financial capacity among citizens. Two years before its inception, Vanmechelen, the artistic and intellectual conceiver of the project, initiated personal conversations with the local community to share his vision, solicit input and discuss objectives. Historical and cultural elements of value to the community were integrated in the masterplan and a dynamic platform of citizen collaboration developed with representation from the neighbourhood, the city and the artist studio. To date, over 30 projects and installations have been developed/executed in collaboration with the community, civil society and schools, covering technical design, execution of installations, content development, organisation of events, educational activities and research projects. An average of 40 community members are involved as volunteers in the park and 2 Community Managers are dedicated to community and civil society collaboration. On explicit request of the artist, the entrance revenue for LABIOMISTA is reinvested fully in the public function of the park and neighbourhood projects.
By attracting new (inter)national audiences, partnerships and investments, LABIOMISTA has also created new economic opportunities for local residents. Vanmechelen, with support from the city, has purposefully eschewed commercial dining, lodging, and recreation options on the site. Instead, the project promotes and supports local businesses and neighbourhood initiatives. Nomadland, with its allotment gardens, picnic areas and event space is one such example. Developed in partnership with local ngo’s and entrepreneurs it is a place where visitors and communities meet and discover the diversity of local food and cultures. Other initiatives include a youth activation-floor, b&b, art gallery, food forest, etc. The area has become an important tourist destination and a magnet of new ideas, initiatives and investments.
LABIOMISTA is a public private partnership between international artist Koen Vanmechelen and the city of Genk. It is the embodiment of Vanmechelen’s artistic and philosophical vision. The artist is responsible for the overall concept and design and for the integration of different disciplines in the site's development. He ensured investment for some of the site's key components: The Battery (artist studio by Mario Botta); the animal stables and LaMouseion (think boxes in Protected Paradise); acquisition and maintenance of animals; and the creation and realisation of the art installations. The artist studio, OpUnDi and related foundations lead the development of content and partnerships.
For the city of Genk, LABIOMISTA is both a neighbourhood regeneration project and a major, future-facing driver of development, designed to inject the city – and the wider world – with fresh ideas and new projects on sustainability and inclusion. The city made possible the adaptive reuse of the land on which the complex sits and coordinated the realisation of The Ark (entrance building); LabOvo (speaker’s corner and public pavilion), restoration of the villa and development of the public park. The city manages the public/touristic part of the site as well as local community collaboration.
The local community played a key role in registering the villa as heritage and is involved in numerous installations and projects on the site. They are key partner in the development of new projects adjacent to or emerging from LABIOMISTA.
Apart from the investment of the artist and that of the city of Genk, the project was funded by the Flemish government as an urban renewal project. This allowed for the development of the park, the entrance building and of LabOvo. The project is additionally being supported by Flanders Heritage Agency, who funded the restoration of the villa, Tourism Flanders and Tourism Limburg, who position the project as a touristic catalyst for the region.
Next to Vanmechelen’s transdisciplinary artworks, various architectural highlights, heritage, and landscaping elements are reflected in the design and implementation. The Ark, the entrance and The Battery, the artist’s studio, are built by Swiss architect Mario Botta. The Villa, an eclectic-historical style with features of Mosan Renaissance is listed as heritage. Team van Meer restored the interior. Furniture and installations are by Vanmechelen. LabOvo, the pavilion/amphitheatre in the park is by Belgian-Spanish architects Van Belle & Medina. The park is designed by BUROLandschap, a Belgian landscape planning and urban design firm. Scenography is by Voet & DeBrabander. On biodiversity enhancement and research, LABIOMISTA collaborates with Natuurpunt, National Park Hoge Kempen and various universities.
Under the leadership of the artist and the Mayor of Genk, a transdisciplinary team was set up for implementation and management, with representatives from the artist studio and various city departments: community work, spatial planning, tourism, strategic planning and communication. Vanmechelen is the key driving force of the project. He attracts and integrates various disciplines and communities through collaborative art projects, ensuring the integrity of the vision and the role of art is maintained in the collaboration. His studio manages the further development of the transdisciplinary partnerships and translates international projects to local context where relevant. Within the city, the Mayor takes personal responsibility over the strategic integration of the project in the city. Different departments identify local opportunities for partnerships and growth. A Site Manager appointed by the city, manages the visitor flows, ticketing, tours, overall park maintenance and internal coordination. LABIOMISTA projects, community collaboration, events, communication, significant infrastructural changes and partnerships are managed by the transdisciplinary team.
LABIOMISTA turned a vacant area of built-up land into a 24 ha ‘ode to biocultural diversity’, an artwork, public park and center of knowledge creation in the heart of one of the most challenging areas of the city. After 20 years of vacancy, it has become the beating heart of the area with places for unstructured encounters, socializing, events and projects as well as for scientific research, solitude and reflection. A healing zone and nerve centre for transdisciplinary collaboration and citizen engagement, LABIOMISTA has strengthened the unique identity of the area, and has brought both residents and visitors closer to nature. Since its opening in July 2019, over 150.000 people have visited the site.
The project’s aesthetic and ecological engagement was widely picked up in the international press. Wallpaper, German Vogue, Trouw and the Dutch Financial daily newspaper are all enthusiastic about the project. Television crews from Arte, 3Sat, ORF and VPRO visited and reported on it. In Belgium, the project is regularly carried by the main newsoutlets. This has attracted new (inter)national audiences, partnerships, tourism and investments to the region, and has created new economic opportunities for local residents. Numerous events like Science day, Nocturnes, Day of the Park generated a lot of enthusiasm and led participants to look at the natural world around them differently.
For the city, LABIOMISTA has become an important tourist destination and a magnet of new ideas, initiatives and investments. According to the mayor, LABIOMISTA has the potential to turn the city into a lab, one in which social, cultural and biological diversity can grow and flourish. Vanmechelen has subsequently initiated 'LaVieBreede' from the vision, philosophy and success of LABIOMISTA: a substantive and infrastructural multi-year plan for the further development of a sustainable and dynamic ecosystem that interconnects the north of Genk.
LABIOMISTA presents a new bold approach to urban renewal. A major redevelopment project, fully envisioned by an artist, that at once rehabilitates the natural landscape, inspires social transformation and stimulates economic growth in the region. LABIOMISTA introduces a wild gene in the urban structure; starting from the explosiveness of creativity and from the beauty of life itself. A great park for biocultural diversity in the middle of the city, a monumental, multi-faceted project which is also a 24 ha evolving work of art on the mix of life. Set up as a catalyst for mutual understanding and a guiding light in our search for answers to the great challenges of the 21st century.
LABIOMISTA demonstrates how art can offer new ways to bring people closer to nature and engage communities in understanding the dynamics of our ecosystems. It presents a new vision on parks and animals in parks. It also exemplifies how art can directly and indirectly impact the economic and ecological vitality of a region, connecting local communities with international audiences, art with science, human with animals, culture with nature.
In its contractual agreement, financial revenue streams, and operational structure, LABIOMISTA provides a new blueprint and model for public-private partnerships. It offers novel insights in how the collaboration between an artist and a city can evolve and can trigger and shape the regeneration of the area. From an organizational perspective, it bridges the freedom of the arts with the structural approach of a city administration and explores how to build confidence in ambiguity, uncertainty and the willingness to experiment. It also provides learning on where this creates tension and conflict and how this can be prevented or addressed.
LABIOMISTA uses the settings and methods of art to bring people closer to nature, highlight the issues at stake in our relations with other species and to engage people in positive action.
The site is conceived as an evolving work of art and meeting place between people and animals. The human component in LABIOMISTA is contained and takes on only a fraction of the total space, while other species are given much more freedom to roam. With space for alpacas and art, wilderness and wonder, LABIOMISTA invites, challenges and inspires you to think about the current society and the society of the future.
But LABIOMISTA is more than a single work of art. It is home to Vanmechelen’s Open University of Diversity, a hotbed of new ideas, creations, projects and collaborations. In OpUnDi, living art installations are positioned as generators of novel useful ideas, to be further discovered and tested through the reasoning of science or through practical application by the communities. Each project develops its own transdisciplinary community. The collaborations and community partnerships are essential to the site’s evolution and operation. Through the projects, the site evolves organically as the artist continues to translate what he learns into new art installations.
LABIOMISTA thus creates new life. In so doing, it inspires and fertilises its environment with energy and initiatives in various cultural, social and economic areas. This creates a profound and unique cross-fertilisation between the artist and the community, creativity and society. Community collaboration has remained a key in the development and operation of LABIOMISTA and in the gradual development of the surrounding areas. On explicit request of the artist, the entrance revenue for LABIOMISTA is reinvested fully in the public function of the park and in neighbourhood projects.
LABIOMISTA exemplifies how art can be an access door to the splendour of the world. It demonstrates how pushing art far outside the walls of the traditional art spaces, deep into the communities, can offer new ways to engage people with nature, with life and with each other.
LABIOMISTA is a case study on how investment in art and nature can directly and indirectly impact the economic and ecological vitality of a region. Its contractual agreement, financial revenue streams and operational structure, can be a blueprint and model for public-private partnerships between the creative and civil sector. The project further exemplifies how the collaboration between an artist and a city can trigger and shape the regeneration of the area.
Engagement with local communities and other civic partners is key to the continuous development and operation of the site and its surrounding areas. Transdisciplinary projects and communities (art, science and communities; local and global) are the modus operandi of LABIOMISTA. Since the opening in 2019, over 50 projects. installations and events that bring people closer to nature and to each other have been organised by LABIOMISTA, offering a new approach to community development.
LABIOMISTA’s primary objective is to foster discussions across a wide range of people, from the public to artists to scholars, about how we can create more diverse, sustainable communities and about our relationship to other living creatures with which we share the earth. The project is motivated by the belief that art has an important role to play in enhancing understanding of and developing solutions for critical topics as diversity and resilience, shifting outlooks on the environment, the relationships between nature and culture, and sustainable community building.
By interconnecting art, nature, animals and people, LABIOMISTA emotionally engages people with their environment and invites them to interpret the world we live in anew, to think in terms of ecosystems and grasp the signals that nature sends us. It is important that this happens locally, in vulnerable communities in industrial cities, close to home.
Projects that develop in and around LABIOMISTA function as fertile microclimates where people can meet, with and in nature, with and in the community, to start a conversation. Examples include MEE, BEE & TREE, which brings together beekeepers from the neighbourhood, the artist and local youth groups around biodiversity and BETWEEN JUNGLE AND CIVILISATION, which invited moth-catchers from Flanders and the Netherlands to city landmarks and resident gardens, to count moths and different locations and give the diversity of insect nightlife center stage. The project was given a permanent place and function at LABIOMISTA with the artwork ‘Instead of Sleeping’. Knowledge generated through these projects is passed on through an (international) network of knowledge institutes, art spaces and social organisations.
LABIOMISTA thus demonstrates what art, in the spirit of interdependency and cross-disciplinary collaboration, can do for sustainability and resilience thinking and how it can contribute directly and indirectly to the realisation of the UNSDGs.
