• DRIFT

    Lonneke Gordijn + Ralph Nauta

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Photography: courtesy Drift 
04 / 11 / 2022
“We use technology to understand the principles of nature and to recreate the way it makes us feel. This is the only way we can change our behaviour.” 
The phrase is from Lonneke Gordijn but clearly represents the mission of the more than six dozen creatives and engineers that make up DRIFT, the studio she founded together with Ralph Nauta in 2007. In an exercise of “freedom and emotion”, they use their installations and sculptures as the perfect metamorphosis to dissect paradigms and transform mentalities. The result, which has even been shown at the Venice Biennale and the Burning Man festival, reminds us that art is necessary and that nature is “the only source of inspiration”.

Inês Graça: In a 2016 interview, you said you were living “in a time when everything is separated into blocks of knowledge.” Do you feel that the collaborative spirit has evolved since then? Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta: Absolutely. We have recently worked on a project about intuition with Andrea Evers, a scientist, professor and director of the Leiden Institute of Psychology, and we have been talking to different scientists to see how they use intuition in their work. Despite needing to prove everything they know, we came to the conclusion that they still use intuition and that was a significant realisation. There is collaboration, but there is also knowledge, it all comes together. We are also currently looking for a new general manager for the studio and we don’t want someone from the art world, we want someone from the technology side. It’s like searching for new connections that offer us a bit more resilience, but also help us to move forward.

People tend to associate nature with a certain kind of tranquillity, but you are particularly interested in its more transformational and effervescent nature. How can technology be a vehicle for disseminating this message? Nature is the only source of inspiration. For technology, for business models, for economics, for all stories. And then there is what we have created from it. We learn a lot from nature: we like to look at it deeply, to understand its message, patterns, behaviour and intelligence. And how can technology deliver this message? Technology is much simpler than nature, because nature can transform itself. We use technology to learn about the principles of nature and then we try to recreate that sense of connection so that we can change our behaviour and the choices we make.
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What elements do you always take into consideration? The most important thing is what the work communicates to the audience, how it makes you feel. If this emotional connection is missing, then it’s not good work. As for everything else, we use different technologies, techniques and materials, but it is mainly about what people feel and how our work transforms the notion of the space it occupies. 
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For more information, visit Studio Drift website.
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