‘Labyrint’ is a project by the Leuven-based architecture office Gijs Van Vaerenbergh. The project was built in 2015 as a temporary installation to mark the tenth anniversary of the C-mine cultural site. Today, it still stands on the main square between two preserved headframes of the former Winterslag coal mine.

The background sounds echo between the steel walls of the labyrinth. The boisterous laughter of children at play, the loud voice of a lost visitor, the giggling of a couple that thinks it’s alone. The steel was once dark grey but now, after a few years, the walls are full of inscriptions, scratched into the orange layer of rust. Now and then the oppression of the narrow passages makes way for a feeling of openness: at the perspective through an aligned series of round wall openings, when the walls descend to knee level and the walls almost become a floor pattern, or when they transform into round arches, as in the covered courtyard somewhere in the middle, or at one of the corners in the form of a canopy that provides access to the labyrinth, right opposite the former turbine hall of the C-mine in Genk.