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Kaj Boonstra is an artist and architect who operates at the intersection of artistic research, spatial design, and critical ecology. Employing a methodology of somatic storytelling, he creates multi-sensory installations that serve as gateways to complex environmental systems.
As co-founder of Studio Metaform, he leads interdisciplinary collaborations that translate scientific inquiry into public experiences.
Approach
My methodology is one of embodied inquiry. I begin with complex, often politically charged environmental issues and ask: how can this system be made felt?
As an architect (MSc TU Delft), my process involves translating abstract data and scientific research into spatial and somatic experiences. By integrating sound composition, interactive design, and critical storytelling, my installations function as public experiments. They test the capacity of art to create new forms of shared understanding and to foster a more critically engaged ecological consciousness.
Prizes
Stimuleringsfonds Talent Development,
for professional development — 2025
Subsidy KLV-Fonds (Wageningen University & Research), for Singing Soil — 2025
Selection RVO Innovation Impact Challenge IX, for GrondGids — 2025
Subsidy Gemeente Den Haag Cultuurprojecten, for Singing Soil — 2025
Official Selection Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam (AFFR), with Opera for a Melting City — 2023
2nd Prize Competition EXPO2025 Nordic Pavilion, with V8 Architects — 2023
Projects
2026 - Pixel Perfect
2026 - GrondGids
2025 - Singing Soil
2024 - SENSE
2024 - Time Capsule
2024 - Working with Artificial Images
2023 - Opera for a Melting City
2021 - Hidden Myths
2021 - Hotel City
2020 - Embassy
2020 - Digital Heterotopia
Exhibitions & Performances
AFFR, Rotterdam
Museumnacht, Den Haag
Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven
La Trappe Festival, Frankrijk
TAC, Eindhoven
Waterschap Amstel, Gooi en Vecht, Amsterdam
Vrijpaleis, Amsterdam
Hoogtij, Amsterdam
37PK, Haarlem
A spatial installation and workshop that translates Dutch soil biodiversity data from different land use types into a dynamic and immersive experience.
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GrondGids 2026_IX-DESIGN
An interactive experience to bring residents in closer contact with their underground world, in order to increase awareness for the energy transition.
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Opera for a Melting City 2023_FILM
What happens if we continue living like we are right now? What happens if we keep on consuming, polluting and exhausting? What happens if we keep on indulging, spoiling and satisfying ourselves? We’re sweltering on summer days, sunbathing with the city as we’re welcoming climate change with open arms, for better or for worse. So what if, one day, we reach a tipping point, and it becomes so hot in the city, that everything and everyone just starts to melt?
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Digital Heterotopia 2020_ARCHITECTURE
Building upon the notion of discrepancy between community and architecture we created the film ‘A Digital Heteropia for the People of Neot Semadar’, which builds upon Foucault’s idea of the Heterotopia: a place acting like a mirror for the current ‘state’ of a society.
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Hotel City 2020_ARCHITECTURE
Hotel City consists of a series of rooms in which one’s tourist experience is housed. The written essay outlines and introduces the theoretical basis of each room to its reader, while an animated film transports the viewer through these rooms and their thought constructs, confronting you with the nature of Hotel City.
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SENSE 2025_ART-SCIENCE
An immersive audiovisual installation that transforms 36 years of environmental data into an 8-minute audio/visual experience, enabling you to feel climate change.
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Time Capsule 2024_ART-SCIENCE
Reacting to the ineffectiveness of our current response to climate change, I co-created an immersive sonic performance with a guided workshop that translates climate change data into an auditory experience.
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Pixel Perfect 2026_AI
An artificial intelligence model continuously improves a masterpiece: Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. Are we watching an intelligent metabolism reslurping reality into perfection right in front of our eyes, or are we being irresponsible by letting our historical legacy be rewritten into new meanings of ‘masterpiece’?
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Hidden Myths 2021_ARCHITECTURE
Hidden Myths is a transgressive architectural manifestation. It is a symptom of and reaction to a larger phenomenon; a series of Infectious Voidscapes that can be found throughout the city of Mashhad, existing of sites in which all architectural forms of existence have been erased.
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Embassy 2020_ARCHITECTURE
The city as we know it is overly self-absorbed, its citizens unconscious and in need of reflection: on its footprint, its community, its history, its moral imperative. This project sees the emergence of a new ‘embassy’ inside the city, that is populated by ‘things’ as ambassadors, coming from the periphery of this very city, taking their outside views on what it means to live together in a cramped space that is the city.
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