For Wasteland Festival 2025, BYOB rode out with a new instrument: a performance bike fitted with a portable lithium battery, which generated sound in real time in response to the air around it. Organised with Katya Borisova, the 30 km route began in Oeverbos, a forest in Vlaardingen planted over the port's polluted soil and industrial sediment, where what industry left behind lies hidden under the trees.
A ferry across Het Scheur took riders to the quiet gardens of Rozenburg. From there the route passed the stacks of AVR, Europe's largest waste-to-energy facility, and entered Botlek, one of Europe's densest petrochemical clusters, where coal stockpiles, storage tanks and containers leave no visible border between one plant and the next.
Riders rested beneath Air Products' HyCO4 hydrogen plant, marketed as the port's clean-energy future, though its steel and steam look much the same as what came before. On the way back, the bike's sound tangled with the drone of the factories, and the air that had gone unseen all day could finally be heard.
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BYOB (Bring Your Own Bike) is a participatory cycling performance series that explores polluted weather as a collective, embodied phenomenon. Participants ride their own bikes through polluted industrial areas, weathering together under the artist's guidance.
Here the bike is a speculative tool that turns the body into a sensing instrument, tuned to headwind, exhaust, and the smell of oil rising off water. Each pedal stroke is a small negotiation with the air itself, part of a communal practice where environment, socio-political climate, and the human body meet.
The performance has taken place at industrial sites across Europe and South Korea, including ports, refineries, and energy infrastructure. Each ride is shaped by the uneven atmosphere and politics of its location: who breathes what, and where, and who is even allowed to get close enough to ask.
