FORGE Video-Mapping Festival

Light, Sound, and Industrial Architecture

FORGE is one of the most ambitious video-mapping festivals in the German-French-Luxembourgish-Belgian border region. For three days, selected artists project their works, specially developed for the site, onto the facades of the UNESCO World Heritage Site Völklinger Hütte — that monumental ironworks that was in operation from 1873 to 1986 and has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1994.

Competition Format with Two Awards

FORGE is explicitly designed as a competition: Artists apply with concepts, and a jury selects the festival entries from the submissions. The works must meet the following criteria: maximum five minutes duration, synchronized sound, reference to the architecture and ideally to the history of Völklinger Hütte, resolution of 7,200 × 4,500 pixels. During the festival, a jury chooses the best entry, while the audience votes for their favorite — the jury prize and audience award are presented separately.

Artist Fees

Selected artists receive a lump sum of €2,000 net for the production of their festival contribution and workshop fees of €90 net per hour. Travel, accommodation, and meals are covered by the organizer. This positions FORGE as a professional platform for the video-mapping scene in the greater region.

A Festival in the Greater Region

The call for entries is specifically aimed at artists from Germany, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg — the cultural area of the Grande Région. This aligns with the cross-border programming of Völklinger Hütte, which has repeatedly realized European art projects in recent years (e.g., the Urban Art Biennale, the Buddha Museum, the Generation Pop exhibition).

The Ore Yard as a Stage

The central venue is the Erzhof (Ore Yard) of Völklinger Hütte — that vast forecourt where pig iron was once stored and the blast furnaces were fed. Today, it serves as an open-air venue for concerts and festivals. With the blast furnace chimneys in the background and the freestanding steel structures as projection surfaces, it offers a stage architecture that is unparalleled by almost any other industrial site in the world.

Völklingen — Industrial Culture and UNESCO

Völklingen is located in the Saarbrücken district, about 10 kilometers west of the Saarland state capital. After the cessation of blast furnace operations in 1986, the former steel town developed into a center of European industrial culture — Völklinger Hütte is the only completely preserved ironworks from the heyday of the steel industry in Europe and North America. FORGE directly builds on this identity by artistically activating the industrial architecture.