DRIFTING

“A calm, dreamlike environment where nature and technology blend into one.”

With DRIFTING, Touki Delphine creates a new ecosystem: suspended high in the theatrical space, 64 reservoirs float in mid-air. They sing and click like a pod of whales, glowing with the soft light of bioluminescent plankton. Together, they form a kelp forest; a mystical habitat, sheltering life in the cold depths of the ocean. Touki Delphine brings this underwater fantasy to life using recycled technology: ethernet cables from the Rataplan, windshield washer fluid reservoirs (and their pumps) from the scrapyard, and speaker wires from their own collected waste are soldered and glued together into a futuristic superorganism.

The installation is inspired by microscopic ocean life: zooplankton, diatoms, and other tiny yet essential beings. Invisible to the human eye, they regulate almost all of Earth’s oxygen and CO₂ balance. They are the quiet engines of our survival. The soundscape of DRIFTING draws on the avant-garde pioneers of the 1950s to the 1990s, with a subtle wink to Debussy’s La Mer. It creates a musical landscape in which nature seems to move with the rhythm of time; the endless motion of everything around us. DRIFTING can be experienced as a meditative visual installation: wander through the space, sit down, listen, and drift along.

About Touki Delphine
Amsterdam-based Touki Delphine (Bo Koek, Rik Elstgeest, Chris Doyle and John van Oostrum) is a boundary-pushing collective of musicians, performers, and visual artists making waves nationally and internationally with their monumental light and sound installations made from recycled materials. Their work creates poetic encounters between humans and machines. Inspired by natural phenomena, the climate crisis and the idea of nature as a living whole, they explore how technology can not only alienate but also connect.

About the musicians
Giuseppe Doronzo is an Italian multi-reed player, composer and performer based in Amsterdam. He focuses his research on the baritone saxophone, expanding a vocabulary at the intersection of contemporary music, jazz improvisation and non-western music. His musical quest merges composed and improvised music with ancient Mediterranean cultures and rituals. In his performances, he introduces instruments discovered during his travels—like the ney-anban (Iranian bagpipe), hulusi (Chinese gourd flute), cyla dyjare (Albanian double flute), and mizmar (Egyptian reed instrument)—which have had a profound emotional and sonic impact on him. He also collaborates with choreographers and filmmakers. He received the BUMA Award for his film music in 2022, the Musician of the Year Award in 2024 from Polish Jazz Press Magazine and in 2025 from the American El Intruso Critic Pool.

Doriene Marselje is a harpist and creator working at the intersection of contemporary music, electronics, and audiovisual performance. In her work, she questions the traditional image of the harp and transforms the instrument into a physical, rhythmic, and layered sound source. Live electronics, analog effects, and modular sound form an integral part of her artistic vocabulary. Marselje performs as a soloist in leading concert halls and festivals in the Netherlands and across Europe, and she is regularly featured on NPO Klassiek. She collaborates closely with composers who write new repertoire for her, including Tony Roe and Valerio Sannicandro, and initiates projects in which new music, improvisation, and technology reinforce one another. Alongside her solo practice, she is active as an orchestral musician and is currently a trialist with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Since 2022, she has also been a principal harp instructor at the Fontys Conservatory in Tilburg.

On Thursday 16 April you can visit the installation | On Friday 17 April, the theater transforms into an intimate live concert featuring performances by leading musicians Doriene Marselje (21:30-22:30) and Giuseppe Doronzo (17:30-18:30).

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