Farbexplosion

On 17 October 2026 the museum was a stage for immersive media art for four hours — and it turned into a thoroughly successful festival. Several hundred visitors came to the courtyard festival of the Westfälische Salzwelten. Crystals grew out of the ground and withdrew where someone passed; a touch made them vanish and grow back from the inside outwards. Everything ran in real time: what could be seen arose from the movement in the room.

Many did not stop at watching. They danced in front of the walls, stretched out their arms, cast their shadows into the crystal fields and watched the image respond. Under the roof the projections ran across walls and sloping ceilings right in between the beams, downstairs in the exhibition across a long wall in the dark, and outside the courtyard glowed in red, violet and blue.

A very warm thank you to the Westfälische Salzwelten and their team. The support was wonderful and went far beyond the usual — for this we thank them expressly and from the heart.

Twenty-three works were on show: nine crystal works that take up the theme of the museum, and fourteen works from the Farbexplosion series, in which posited orders — grids, paths, formations — turn at a touch into clouds of colour powder without contour.

The theme comes from the museum itself: the permanent exhibition “Das weiße Wunder” at the Westfälische Salzwelten leads into underground vaults full of crystals that formed more than 250 million years ago, shows their lattice structure under salt microscopes and tells how brine becomes salt on the Hellweg — Bad Sassendorf is an old salters' town.

The evening's programme included short guided tours of the museum, the “Chemische Gärtnerei”, which grew luminous structures from salts, the master boiler at the salt pan, cyanotypes of one's own at “Blaumachen”, music by Pete Alderton, a salt tasting and workshops for children. The courtyard festival was part of FERROMONE, the regional cultural programme of the Hellweg region.

Saturday, 17 October 2026, 6 to 10 pm, Hof Haulle, An der Rosenau 2, 59505 Bad Sassendorf. The full programme is still available on the event page.