Het Labo collective was born at the end of the eighties in Hasselt’s Gelatine Factory as a platform that would defend the crossover between the applied and the visual arts, and promote it with thematic exhibitions, and to this day it still does. It is a collective of applied and visual artists who disinterestedly organise thematic exhibitions in order to establish a dialogue between designers and other disciplines, and vice versa. At the same time, they are occasionally commissioned or requested to develop exhibition concepts by cultural entities. While it comes from a more applied-arts background, Het Labo has never avoided confrontation with the visual arts; on the contrary. Perhaps the thread that runs through Het Labo’s history is its myriad of multi-disciplinary thematic exhibitions.