Born in 2011, OFFestival was initially a group of people gravitating around each other in an old garage that doubled as a house, kitchen and dance studio. Dancers, circus performers, musicians, video makers, technicians, cooks, architects and photographers all got involved in the game of fetching technical equipment from Naninne and starting up a festival. What follows is a mix of skills, a loss of reference points, sleepless nights at the top of a ladder to hang lights and an original way of running a home-made performing arts festival.

For a number of years, OFFestival has been the mouthpiece for a growing Brussels artistic community's desire for visibility and sharing. Its programme of shows, creative workshops, culinary performances, interactive exhibitions and other oddities plays with the conditions, criteria and standards of the theatre as a gathering place and social ritual. On the stage, previews and premieres often take place, in a mix of dance, circus, performance, theatre and concert. Throughout the festival, workshops are held in the studio of Ultima Vez/Wim Vandekeybus. Each year, OFFestival also invites a number of Brussels studios where artists or performance groups work to take part in the event, with public openings. Studio Grez / Fatou Traoré, Studio Belgica / Juliana Neves, Volksroom / Ivo Dimchev have all taken part.

OFFestival's first life came to an end in 2017, the fateful year when the couple who live and run the venue split up. Between 2018 and 2023, OFFestival will focus on the experiments of the newly-born GINcubator, a programme of experimental residencies for emerging choreographers that synthesises all the ups and downs the venue has experienced in its youth.

Since 2024, OFFestival has been a time for meeting and socialising, offering residency outings, previews and workshop outings. The intimate space of the garage is transformed into a performance space for a few weeks, giving the artists supported by the GINcubator the chance to meet with audiences, programmers, local residents, artists and performing arts professionals to discuss their work.