WS118 Asiat Park by Johanna Bendlin, Gianni Villa

Asiat Park is the name of a former military base in the city of Vilvoorde, Belgium, which has hosted, since 2019, the Horst Festival, founded and organized by Geerd Foesters. Seven years ago, 51n4e and Plant en Houtgoed were commissioned by the city of Vilvoorde and Onkruid to transform and redevelop the site, which continues to evolve to this date.

Gianni started helping build stages for Horst Festival in 2018, and has come back every year since. A lot has changed since the first time he visited Asiat Park in spring 2019. Plants have grown, buildings have transformed, and stages and installations have blossomed everywhere on the site. Lately, it is not merely the main location of Horst Festival anymore, but also a major public green space for Vilvoorde and its inhabitants. With this series of photographs, all taken during summer 2025, Gianni wanted to make visible the ongoing dialogue between the built environment and the green ecosystem of Asiat Park.

Johanna got to know Asiat Park in 2020 through Horst Festival and the architecture office 51N4E, where she met Gianni. Over the years, she has observed how vegetation takes hold, persists, and disappears—the park revealing itself in a continuous state of becoming. The question of why plants are where they are becomes a way of understanding how the site lives and the park is growing. Often it’s the smaller flowers of ‘weedy plants’ that make these dynamics visible. This book includes a series of pressed plants collected in Asiat Park in the summer of 2025, as a record of what was growing there.

Gianni and Johanna have followed Asiat Park over the years. They came together over the summer of 2025 to share ways of observing the site, always in process and becoming, and a good place to be.

published by Walkscapes
2026, 84 pages, 21 x 30 cm, 84 pages