From the rafters of a spacious studio in Amsterdam Noord, on the north side of the Dutch capital’s bustling harbor, silk-draped lights descend, open like weightless parachutes, then retract and rise again. Their motion is gentle, then abrupt, but ephemeral.
These forms are a part of “Shylight,” a series of kinetic sculptures created by the Dutch artists Ralph Nauta and Lonneke Gordijn of Studio Drift, an art studio established here in 2007. The duo has become known for their ability to seamlessly merge technology with design, making art that mimics the organic movements of nature.
The “Shylight” series has been displayed all over the world, including at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center in New York, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where it has been added to the permanent collection.
Now, the artists have developed “Shy Society,” a version for the outdoors.
Set in a particularly fickle setting, Venice’s Grand Canal, this piece will be displayed in front of a historic palazzo, between the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Ponte dell’Accademia, during the 61st Venice Biennale, which begins May 9.
For anyone who has seen Drift’s “Shy” works before, this new version may appear quite similar. But to make them perform properly for the outdoor setting, Gordijn said in an interview at the studio, they had to be redesigned completely, almost from scratch.
The artists had to contend with all the ways in which the works would be exposed to the elements: water from the canals, the rain and the wind. Not to mention local preservation laws protecting Venice’s historic houses.
“It’s the same concept, but the size, the material, the technology — everything is different,” Gordijn said.
“We think what is important is to create shared moments, the catalyzed energy between people. We found it important to bring that quality to the outdoors, and not to keep it within the walls of a museum.”
The elements of “Shy Society” include a metal contraption that opens and closes the fabric, as well as an LED light fixture. For the indoor version, Gordijn said, the fabric is always silk, which has a particularly “soft quality of movement, of unfolding, of vulnerability,” she said.
With the outdoor version, they had to develop a new fabric, a very thin, knitted nylon “to diffuse the light and also let rain through,” Gordijn said, and new metal mechanisms. Because they could not drill holes in the side of the palazzo’s facade, they found a way to attach the mounts with counterweights indoors, and connect them through the windows.
The outdoor version has been in the works for about a decade. “We always had this dream to take light and movement and textile into the open space,” Gordijn said. An earlier iteration was created for a courtyard in the Palazzo Strozzi in Venice, in what Gordijn called a “half-outdoor space,” where it was displayed in October 2024 until January 2025. The final version has made it more stable, she said.
“Over the years, we really learned that you can reach people in a different way with the language of motion and light,” Gordijn said. “Indoors, we can completely control that, but outdoors, we have way more challenges. Mainly we have been engineering the textiles — it was a lot.”
Nauta said he felt it was particularly important during the Venice Biennale to encourage visitors to the city to stop and observe their surroundings. “All of our work is about slowing down our rhythms,” he said in a video interview from Los Angeles.
“The Biennale is problematic because you are always running from one side of the city to the other, so you forget to look,” Nauta said. But when you’re on one of the public water buses, “you have to slow down, and those moments give you a space of clarity and consciousness with your environment. We wanted to emphasize that with this piece, to be super present, and to get that unexpected beautiful life energy.”
At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the “Shylight” series has been installed in an 18th-century staircase to “bring the stairway alive,” said Ludo van Halem, the Dutch national museum’s curator of 20th-century art, adding that the work appeals to a wide range of visitors.
“It’s a very intriguing ballet in the air,” he said. “It attracts a lot of people who stand still and watch. Sometimes they wait for quite a while until the lamps start moving again.”
Nauta and Gordijn began working with nature and light two decades ago, creating artworks from dandelion seeds attached to LED lights in a design called “Fragile Future.” Today, light-emitting dandelions are still popular items among their private and museum collectors, and every year the team goes out dandelion hunting in the spring to collect dandelion heads that they will painstakingly glue, seed by seed, to LEDs.
Loïc Le Gaillard, a co-founder of Carpenters Workshop Gallery, an international gallery for collectible design with spaces in London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles, recalled meeting Gordijn for the first time in Miami, when the studio had an early version of the light.
“They had literally one module of this incredible dandelion sculpture,” Le Gaillard said in a phone interview. “We looked at it and we were totally fascinated by this little sculpture. We said, ‘OK, you have to do way more.’”
Carpenters Workshop Gallery signed up Drift then, and has worked with the studio ever since, he said.
Drift now employs about 50 staff members and also works with freelance illustrators, textile designers and seamstresses.
“They have gained maturity and they also realize that they have no boundaries,” Le Gaillard added. “They are very strong as a duo because they can encourage each other and stretch themselves to do great things.” He said that the Venice project was their most ambitious art installation yet.
In 2023, New Yorkers were awe-struck when Drift released “Franchise Freedom,” a performance art project in which a synchronized flock of more than 1,000 tiny light-emitting drones were released in Central Park. (The project went ahead against the objections of the Audubon Society, which worried that the piece would impact migrating birds; Gordijn said no birds were harmed.)
Roberta Smith, the New York Times’s co-chief art critic at the time, described the results as, “serenely beautiful, like an enormous lava lamp, made with points of lights instead of oozing goop.”
Van Halem, of the Rijksmuseum, said Drift’s work was a fascinating combination of the delicate and the technologically complex.
“They find ways to really surprise and overwhelm the public, but it’s mostly very light and cheerful,” he said. “There’s always a kind of magic that they bring to their work.”
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