Can a hundred artworks turn Laarne into Flanders’ most beautiful village?

LARA Art Fest concludes its main programme in Laarne, East Flanders, on Sunday, 6 September, after curators Jan Hoet Jr. and Hilde Van Canneyt dispersed more than 100 artworks through the village centre. Works by Panamarenko, Wim Delvoye, Guillaume Bijl and other Belgian artists have occupied the medieval castle, Sint-Macharius Church, local shops, gardens and public space during the ten-day event, according to the festival and De Standaard.

For people living in Belgium, the attraction is unusually direct: this is internationally recognised Belgian contemporary art presented outside the institutional circuit of Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels. Laarne lies about 20 minutes by car from Ghent, and the compact route places major names alongside local artists and ordinary village life. The municipality, heritage organisation Herita, White Duck Fine Arts & Crafts and local businesses are among the stakeholders turning the centre into a temporary cultural venue.

The festival grew out of Art Scene Laarne, held in 2025. Its organisers say the new LARA name recalls the form in which Laarne appeared in written sources roughly 1,000 years ago. White Duck organised the programme with Laarne’s municipal administration and Herita, with support from the local branch of business organisation Unizo. The municipality separately confirmed that the programme combined visual art, lectures, concerts and street entertainment and introduced temporary traffic measures for visitors.

The visual route is less a conventional exhibition than an invitation to look twice. In Sint-Macharius Church, Panamarenko’s 1987 work Pastille Motor No. 2 shares the building with pieces by Bijl and Jan Fabre. Beside the church, Bijl’s businessman performing a handstand disrupts the decorum of the village green. At Laarne Castle, Delvoye’s decorated gas cylinders, cutting discs and imagery associated with his Cloaca series play against historic interiors and antique displays. Other installations appear in shop windows, the Kasteeldreef and White Duck’s garden and temporary gallery.

Hoet told De Standaard that the purpose was to place Laarne, rather than himself, in the spotlight. That ambition continues a recognisable Flemish curatorial tradition. His father, Jan Hoet, brought contemporary art into private homes for Chambres d’Amis in Ghent in 1986 and later into the city’s streets with Over the Edges. VRT NWS describes those projects as central to Hoet’s effort to move art into everyday life; his international reputation was reinforced when he directed Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany, in 1992.

LARA nevertheless exposes a productive disagreement about what such a village festival should achieve. The organisers present the scattered locations as the point: castle, church, traders and public spaces become links in a single encounter between art, heritage and residents. De Standaard’s reviewer found that the most successful works rewarded discovery but judged the selection insufficiently coherent, arguing that few pieces established a specific dialogue with Laarne’s history. The independent arts review De Nieuwe Wandeling was still more reserved, praising contributions by Griet Troch and Laarne-based William Roobrouck while finding the overall route disappointing, particularly Delvoye’s castle display.

That tension matters beyond one municipality. Site-specific festivals can widen access and generate attention for small communities, yet famous names do not automatically make work responsive to its setting. In Laarne, the setting carries substantial weight of its own: the castle, church, wooded avenue and local businesses are not neutral gallery walls but part of the experience visitors are being asked to interpret.

The main festival closes on Sunday, but parts of the visual programme at White Duck’s Tuin08 and Huis12 are scheduled to continue on weekends until 27 September, according to the organiser. No independently verified attendance total, economic-impact figure or plan for a 2027 edition has yet been published. Those numbers—and whether future commissions engage more deliberately with Laarne’s residents and history—will determine whether LARA becomes an annual fixture or remains an ambitious experiment in taking Flemish art beyond the museum.