From a Namur association to an annual programme.

KIKK Festival is an annual festival of digital and creative cultures held in Namur, the capital of Wallonia in Belgium. Behind it is an association also called KIKK, and the festival’s own 2015 website described that association as a Namur-based organisation promoting digital and creative cultures, founded in September 2011. The association says it builds bridges between art, science and technology through events, educational projects, experimental research and the production of artworks, and that it began its activities in 2011 with the festival itself.

The people behind the festival come from Namur’s own digital studios. Writing in La Libre Belgique on 29 October 2014, the journalist Alain Lorfèvre described Dog Studio as a Namur company and reported that “the Bazelaire brothers”, its founders, and their team were putting on the fourth edition of KIKK Festival on 6 and 7 November 2014. Lorfèvre quoted the organisers as wanting KIKK to scout new trends and innovation, and to mix audiences so that digital work would feel less abstract and less complicated to the public. The 2015 festival website carried a footer saying the event was powered by Superbe and Dogstudio.

Six years after the opening edition, the French lab-culture magazine Makery sent the journalist Carine Claude to Namur. Her report, published on 7 November 2017, covered the seventh KIKK festival, held from 2 to 4 November 2017, and described three days of free events mixing art, do-it-yourself making and technology. She quoted Marie du Chastel, the festival’s curator and coordinator, who said the 2011 edition had been a national, very Belgian event, and that the festival had grown quickly since. Du Chastel told Makery that she spends the year visiting international festivals to find speakers who fit each year’s theme.

By 2020 the man named as the festival’s director was Gilles Bazelaire. In an article distributed by the Belga news agency and published by RTBF on 23 October 2020, he explained why the organisers had called off the tenth edition, which had been planned for 5 to 8 November 2020 in Namur. RTBF reported that the change in health rules had cut the capacity of cultural venues, leaving the festival unable to use rooms such as the Théâtre de Namur as planned, and that volunteers had begun to withdraw.

A theme a year, a theatre at the centre and a city as a stage.

KIKK does not keep one fixed slogan. Each edition has carried its own title, and that title shapes the programme, the speakers and the look of the year. The festival’s 2015 website listed the earlier editions by name: 2012 was “Travel in the direction of your fears”, 2013 was “Next Utopia” and 2014 was “The State of Play”, while the 2015 edition itself ran under the title “Fold / Unfold”. Makery reported that the thread of the 2017 edition was “Invisible Narratives”, a theme about surveillance and the hidden systems and algorithms that filter what people see. On its main stage that year, the magazine wrote, the speakers included the science-fiction author Bruce Sterling and the curator and writer Régine Debatty.

The venue is part of how the festival is remembered. Makery described the Théâtre royal de Namur as the festival’s headquarters in 2017, with the conferences held under its gilded ceilings. Around it, the 2017 programme spread across the old town: a performance by the Belgian artist Lawrence Malstaf took place in the deconsecrated church of Harscamp, a children’s exhibition called Little Kikk was set up in the Notre-Dame school, and a makers’ hall, the Kikk Market, showed prototypes from local fab labs and hacker spaces next to start-up projects. Du Chastel told the magazine that 2017 was the year the festival began placing installations in the streets, with the long-term aim of producing works that would stay in public space after the event.

That move into the town became a named strand. A partner page published by RTBF on 30 September 2024 presented the thirteenth edition, held from 24 to 27 October 2024, under the theme “True/False”, and listed venues including the Pavillon, the Delta and the Galerie du Beffroi, with KIKK in Town described as an immersive art trail through the city. The same page listed a Kikk Market with a gaming section and an illustration market.

The festival also produced permanent places. Makery reported that the TRAKK fab lab and creative space was founded in 2014 by KIKK together with the BEP, the economic office of the province of Namur, the university and the Namur ressourcerie. The festival’s 2015 website described TRAKK as a creative hub and fab lab in Namur and listed a Smart Gastronomy Lab, a living lab working where food and technology meet, among the association’s projects.

A festival named for its association.

A festival or conference carries its brand differently from a product. The name and the core mark usually stay fixed, while the look around them is rebuilt for each edition. That annual identity is often commissioned from a different studio or artist every year, which turns the event into a running sequence of design briefs and makes the archive of past posters, badges and websites part of the brand itself.

Moving image matters as much as print. Title sequences, stage openers and short idents run between talks and set the tone in a room before anyone speaks, and they are often where a commissioned designer has the most freedom. The venue becomes a brand surface too: a city, a building or a recurring location can attach itself so closely to the name that the two are remembered together, and a move to a new place can feel like a redesign.

The programme is the working document of the identity. Stage names, track colours, wayfinding, lanyards and schedule apps all carry the system at small sizes and under pressure, so type choices and colour coding have to stay legible on a phone screen, a printed map and a large projection in the same week.

Editions, themes and venues, dated.

Read as an identity, KIKK works on two levels. The fixed layer is short: the four-letter name, the city of Namur and the description of the event as a festival of digital and creative cultures, wording that appears on the festival’s own site and in the RTBF reports of 2020 and 2024. The changing layer is the yearly title. “Next Utopia” in 2013, “The State of Play” in 2014, “Fold / Unfold” in 2015, “Invisible Narratives” in 2017 and “True/False” in 2024 each gave the edition a new subject, and with it a new set of speakers, artworks and posters.

The organisers’ background sits close to the festival. The 2015 site credited two studios, Dogstudio and Superbe, in its footer, and La Libre Belgique placed the Bazelaire brothers, the founders of Dog Studio, behind the festival in 2014. In 2020 RTBF named Gilles Bazelaire as the festival’s director, and in 2017 Makery named Marie du Chastel as its curator and coordinator, the person who chooses speakers to fit each theme.

The places matter as much as the graphics. In 2017 the Théâtre royal de Namur carried the conferences, a deconsecrated church carried a performance and a school carried the children’s exhibition; by 2024 the festival was using the Pavillon, the Delta and the Galerie du Beffroi, with KIKK in Town linking them through the streets. TRAKK, founded in 2014, gives the association a year-round address beyond the festival week.

For a design guide, KIKK Festival shows how an event can keep a short, stable name while letting a yearly theme carry much of the visual change, and how a city can become part of the identity. Compare it with OFFF, another festival rooted in digital and motion design, and with What Design Can Do, which also builds its programme around a changing theme. For this guide we use night blue, stone and signal red with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep KIKK Festival’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.