Mentalgassi fills the Exit Festival with airheads

Last month we were at the Petrovaradin fortress in Novi Sad, Serbia where the 11th edition of the Exit Festival took place. Among the 165.000 party animals were our friends Mentalgassi – so a nice opportunity to catch up with them and talk about the huge balloons they created there.


We love your travel pics on Facebook. How was your time in Serbia?
Serbia was just great! We really have to thank everybody over there for giving us this opportunity and helping us realise our ideas. The people in Serbia seem to embrace the world with open arms and we think the Western-European youth should direct their heads more in that direction, because people and ideas over there have so much of energy. The Exit-collective also is a bunch of hyperactive enthusiasts! It’s very inspiring to make a festival like this out of almost nothing!

Last time we met in Belgium you worked on an amazing skate ramp. What inspired you to make balloons this time?
We’ve really wanted to do this balloon project for a long time and it was great to have them floating over the event, so they could be seen from far away as people approached the festival site. We also wanted the balloons to be a meeting point, so people could say ‘Let’s meet under that balloon head!’ – a landmark with a Mentalgassi touch, with a face that fits the festival crowd. That’s why the portraits had to look happy in a way, because we were quite sure that the festival-goers would be happy here at Exit.

Surely it can’t be easy to put a 3 meters balloon in the air?
Well, the production was kind of like what we were doing with the recycling bins. And that experience really helped us. The prints were produced on sticker foil and were applied to the helium filled balloons. For the night-time moon effect the balloons had a light placed inside. Fortunately we had people helping us do this stuff and it turned out to be a nice sight for the festival crowd.

What’s next on the agenda for Mentalgassi?
We’re planning on doing two more festivals: Lowlands Festival in Netherlands and then we’ll be in Paris for the second time this year. Then there’s more stuff to come and you guys can just check out the Mentalgassi Fanpage on Facebook to follow our upcoming projects. September will have more to offer. We can’t talk about it yet, but if you can make it, try to visit Bilbao, Spain this September and keep a close eye on the streets…