Review OFFF by Night

Entering the festival area already a nice experience in itself. We immediately bumped into a live-painting with Staynice, several funny extraordinary ping-pong tables by King of Pong. A massive screen, a big lovely local food market with global flavors, arcade games, a Q&A-stage and demo/workshop studios by Adobe and Wacom. All together this created a nice bazar-ish contemporary nightlife setting that made you ready for a inspirational night to come.

Because of this setting it felt more as a night fair, walk round, taste a little of everything join a Q&A, play a game, have a beer, meet people, play ping-pong... We totally did not have the urge to be in the main conference room. Because we could really cherry pick, create our own OFFF by Night flavor. During the night we only saw three speakers on the main stage. Dj/producer Lefto and filmmaker Kurt de Leijer talked about their upcoming film & documentary serie LEFTO - In Transit. Next we attended the session with William Arnold of The Mill. He talked about how personal projects influenced the creation of the titles for OFFF by Night. Before Arnold started his session, initiator and curator Rizon Parein came on stage and helt an emotional thank you speech, you could really feel the room filling with love.

One talk we really want to highlight is from Amsterdam based artist duo Lernert & Sander. We have seen them speak several times before and their talk is always different, funny and entertaining. This time the talk was called 'RIP OFFF'. While explaining the process behind some of their projects and showing final results, they also showed 'free interpretations' of their work made by someone-else, somewhere-else for a different client, or even for one of their clients! Lernert & Sander showed examples of there copied work that were so striking. It was funny but sad at the same time... But the duo strengthen themselves with the most wonderful quotes about forgiveness. At the end of the talk, Lernert & Sander did something remarkable: Live on stage they sent out an e-mail to all the mentioned 'copycats' saying 'We forgive you'. This was a truly beautiful ending to an inspirational lecture.

An engaging experience it was! We definitely had a good time, everybody was smiling, enjoying and recharging themselves in a truly colorful and inspirational setting. A night edition has such a different spirit, that we expect this type of event is going to be organised more and more around the globe. We are definitly looking forward to the next edition of OFFF by Night.