Lud Absolud is a multi-talented artist and stage designer. He is driven by his unquenchable creativity. Everything he does is completely unique to the type of event and audience he’s crafting for, he knows how to engage and tantalise an audience’s senses. His true power lies in being able to shape his wildly unique vision out of recycled and up-cycled materials.

It all started back in the early 90’s, Lud was working his brother with designing and making décor for parties and festivals in the Netherlands. A hobby that turned into his full-time passion and career. This has since taken him to events and venues all over the world, creating dream worlds for people of all walks of life, using as much recycled materials as he can get his hands on.

In the mid 90’s, he and two of his closest friends launched an event series and organisation in Amsterdam, Netherlands. They organised a number of memorable and successful events, which left Lud hungry for more and led him to moving across the world to Thailand in the early 2000’s. From the outset, he made his mark working as a DJ and designing bars and clubs on some of the country’s most renowned islands. This included his own venue, Moov, which was initially built on a beach then moved inland to a bigger location that housed a tree house, a steam room built made from beer bottles and reclaimed glass, and other hand-crafted statues and artworks.

He later left the islands to take his passion on the road and travelled the world from festival to festival. Some of his builds include becoming the creative director for Kolour events in Thailand, build stages for Quest Festival in Vietnam, being part of the creative team behind Magneet Festival in Amsterdam, Jaithep festival in Chiang Mai, Mystic Valley creating the iconic owl stage for Iconic studios, Fly to the moon stages and creating the mainstage for Chiwowwah Town Festival in Australia.

In 2016, Lud built his own home from the ground up in an artist community in Amsterdam. The structure was constructed from an old porto cabin combined with reclaimed materials which he found on the streets of the city and fitted into a fully functional house.

All of this wouldn’t be possible without the amazing build team he’s worked with over the years. Although the team is always changing depending on where Lud is in the world, one of his main co-creators is his best friend Jaap. Together they’ve been working on builds for over 15 years, crafting anything from stages to art installations for people to experience and interact with. As a pair they really tap into a new source of magic that leads them to crafting the most intriguing designs.

In a world where we create a lot of waste, the aim has always been to use as much recycled and reclaimed material as possible to build all his stages and installations. They describe hunting local scrapyards for items they can use in their designs like finding pieces to a puzzle that they’re putting together. They hope that their builds help people feel inspired to get creative and start to look at their trash in a different way.