An experience with meaning.
Van Gogh Homeland offers perspectives for the future. Van Gogh Homeland stimulates the senses, sharpens the minds, inspires, convinces and seduces. Not just by telling, but above all by letting people experience it.
Van Gogh Homeland follows the footsteps of the great Brabant master Vincent van Gogh.
In an extensive multi-disciplinary program, Van Gogh Homeland uses Vincent’s unique perspective on his homeland Brabant and the imagination of the hospitality domain to involve a large audience in the major challenges of today in a super attractive way.
There are many initiatives and stories in Brabant on how to deal with these challenges. Van Gogh Homeland believes that the expertise of the leisure domain can be used to make these stories experienceable for a wide audience.
Brabant will have a ‘Van Gogh Homeland’ with landscape art and attractions.
The biennial will start first in 2025. Architect Winy Maas, co-founder of MVRDV, has been asked to be the first curator to shape this biennial. It will be an outdoor exhibition full of interventions and temporary installations where typical Brabant landscape elements are given a stage. Visitors will go on an adventurous expedition past temporary super dunes, horticultural towers, rain chambers and heath houses that will be placed throughout the landscape. Inspired by Van Gogh’s vision of the Brabant landscape, makers are invited to accentuate Brabant superlatives and explore the limits of the possibilities of multiple use of space.
The intention is for the biennale to be organized once every two years, each time in a different Brabant region. The first biennale will take place in central Brabant with the municipality of Tilburg as the center. Initiators Joost Melis, director of the Van Gogh Homeland Foundation and program maker Lian Duif: ‘Such a Brabant biennial will manifest itself not only in the landscape, but also in the urban area. Van Gogh Homeland will further strengthen Brabant identity as a whole. Its accessible nature makes a visit attractive to different target groups. It is expected that, thanks to the way of presenting, young people will also feel more involved in the major transition tasks and the landscape that surrounds them and that they will manage in the future.’
Van Gogh Homeland is an initiative of Midpoint Brabant – Van Gogh Homeland Foundation and is being realized by MVRDV in partnership with the Municipality of Tilburg, the Efteling and Libéma. The province of North Brabant facilitates the development of the plan.
Studio Kluif is responsible for the design and communication of this wonderful initiative.