There is something quietly radical about standing in the Cour de l’Hôtel de Ville de Bruxelles and holding up your phone to find a sculpture blooming in the air before you. No plinth, no velvet rope, no hushed gallery attendant. Just you, the cobblestones, and a shimmering, abstract form suspended in augmented reality, whispering about love.

Springs of Love is the latest work from Polish-born interdisciplinary artist Gabi von Seltmann and visual artist Popesz Csaba Láng, developed in collaboration with digital artist and VR programmer Javier Muñoz and the Photon Foundation. It has found perhaps its most fitting home here in Brussels — a city that has long served as Europe’s unlikely beating heart, a crossroads of cultures, languages and political ambitions — where it sits not inside a white cube but in one of the city’s grandest civic spaces, open to anyone who wanders past.

The premise is disarmingly simple. A QR code. A phone. And suddenly, a virtual sculpture — animated, abstract, genuinely beautiful — materialises in front of you. Walk around it. Lean in. Step back. The work rewards curiosity and patience, shifting and revealing itself differently depending on where you stand and how long you linger. In this sense, Springs of Love does something that a great deal of contemporary art only promises: it actually changes with the viewer.

But there is more to it than technical novelty. The project was conceived as a symbolic meeting point of peace and love, and that intention carries weight precisely because it does not feel forced. We are living through an era saturated with anxiety — geopolitical fractures, the slow erosion of trust, a creeping exhaustion with the world’s loudness. Into this, von Seltmann and Láng offer something that feels almost countercultural in its gentleness: an invitation to slow down. To share a moment. To look at the same thing as the stranger standing beside you and feel, however briefly, that you are not so far apart.

The installation’s soundtrack deepens this effect considerably. The voice and poetry of Urszula Honek — an award-winning Polish poet and writer — thread through the experience, adding an intimate, lyrical register that pulls the work away from pure spectacle and towards something more inward. Her words do not explain the sculpture; they accompany it, the way a good poem accompanies a feeling you could not quite name on your own.

The project generated considerable conversation beyond the installation itself. In October 2025, a dedicated panel on Springs of Love took place during The Asian Literary Festival Brussels 2025, held from the 3rd to the 5th of October. The session proved to be one of the most attended of the entire festival — a telling indication of just how deeply the project’s questions about art, technology, empathy and public space resonate with contemporary audiences. That a literary festival should provide the forum for such a discussion speaks to the increasingly fluid boundaries between disciplines, and to the hunger for conversations that connect the digital and the deeply human.v

Von Seltmann’s artistic practice has always been drawn to the intersections of memory, identity and public space, working across performance, photography, video and digital media. There is a continuity here with her broader concerns — who claims public space, who is invited into it, what kinds of emotion are permitted to exist within it. By placing a work explicitly about love and peace in a civic square, she is making a gentle but pointed argument: that these are not private, decorative sentiments but public, political ones.

Popesz Csaba Láng brings a visual sensibility that is both precisely constructed and surprisingly warm, while Javier Muñoz’s technical artistry ensures that the augmented reality element feels not like a gimmick bolted onto a conventional artwork, but utterly integral to what the piece is trying to say. The fact that the sculpture exists only in digital space — that it cannot be owned, cannot be moved to a collector’s sitting room, cannot be fenced off — is itself part of its meaning.

Springs of Love has been proposed by the Polish Institute Brussels, and it is worth pausing on that context. Cultural diplomacy at its best does not wave flags; it opens conversations. This installation, rooted in Polish artistic talent yet speaking in a visual and emotional language that requires no translation, is a rather good example of what that can look like in practice.

“May peace and love unite us all,” reads the project’s guiding statement. In other contexts, that sentiment might sound naïve, even a little earnest. Standing in the Cour de l’Hôtel de Ville with a glowing abstract sculpture floating in the air before you, poetry murmuring through your headphones, other people stopping beside you to see what you are seeing — it sounds, for a moment, entirely reasonable.

Springs of Love is on display at the Cour de l’Hôtel de Ville de Bruxelles. Access is free via QR code. Follow the project at @springs_of_love_project and the artists at @gabi_von_seltmann and @elektromoon.

— Emanuelle Cohen-