We could be Hieronymus

‘It’s a different experience each day.” So said Erik de Jong, the director of Bosch Parade, a four-day spectacular in the Dutch city of ’s-Hertogenbosch. The biennial event, now in its 11th edition, seeks to reimagine the legacy of the city’s most famous son, painter Hieronymus Bosch.

Though the city celebrated the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death in 2016, none of Bosch’s works remain in the place where he lived and worked. A museum is dedicated to him here, and statues of his more famous creations are to be found throughout the still extant medieval canal system. But it all feels a bit sedate. De Jong’s aim is to “reinvest the painter and his fantasies back into the city”. Hence the installations that float down the river Dommel.

If any spirit could be sensed at the Bosch Parade, it was that of the Netherlands of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, where punk, rave, and the do-it-yourself ethos informed a sizeable chunk of the country’s culture. Some scenes at the festival’s creative HQ, the Tuin der Lusten (“garden of earthly delights”), a waterside patch of ground in front of the old city fortifications, mirrored old-style Dutch squat “happenings” from 30 years earlier. Collective “glocal” action is key. De Jong stressed that “making something together” was the lodestar: more than 200 locals volunteer their services, from bar staff and artist handlers to swimmers pushing floats.

The theme for 2026 was “empowered by defects”. In the garden, artist and parade curator David Bade had set up the Burn Out Clinic, a collectively built assortment of odd, psychedelic assemblages and something named the “flaw machine”, in which the assemblers’ problems, “after a modest ascent to heaven, are decisively smashed to pieces”.

On a swelteringly hot morning before the Saturday carnival, the performers shared a last fag or munched on a sandwich before attaching flimsy handmade wings, donning wetsuits, or suits of feathers, or painting their faces blue. The parade was organised, like a Bosch triptych, into three sections; the interpretations were ingenious and surprising rather than slavish.

A gentle and thought-provoking floating ballet called Als Verlangen Dansen (“dancing as longing”) was in stark contrast to the actions of 155: an absurdist breakdance crew dressed in chainmail. Each crew member took turns to be held by their ankles by a winch, and, suspended upside down, flung about, and dipped into the river.

The medieval painter’s spirit was maybe best captured by floats that used a form of outlandish parable. On a loose collection of rafts employing blue-painted oil drums, the huge group Wijffamilie proclaimed “de fanfare van oliedom” (“the fanfare of the reign of oil”), dressed in costumes that nodded equally to The Wizard of Oz’s Tin Man and the Blue Meanies from Yellow Submarine. Domenico Mangano and Marieke van Rooy’s piece, Het Arkoor, was a wooden raft shaped as a human ear, upon which musicians – one of which a frog-like creature, possibly the most Boschian thing on display – played discordantly: a commentary on our inability to listen.

Afterwards, surrounded by artists packing up their costumes, De Jong wished his “small city with big dreams” would “face the world a bit more”, citing nearby Tilburg and Eindhoven as examples. And what of the volunteer swimmers, the float-pushers? One woman, a serene lady not in her first summer, suggested that the Dommel’s deceptive current can leave you out of puff.

Illustration by Oscar Ingham for The Observer