My graduation work is a collection of minimalistic gestures on various polymers, composites and alloys, with an emphasis on materials that contradict natural rhythms through engineering, such as memory foam or galvanized steel, as well as materials developed into parodies of their more valuable, intricate counterparts; plexiglass, MDF.

Using a predefined text format and the context of the exhibition itself, I am interested in parallelism and translations performed in real time, as objects get paired up with their adjacent specification and start to mirror each other to the point of both redundancy and revelation.

This project, alongside my thesis, explores the claim that we navigate everyday life mostly surrounded by symbols or stand-ins for a distant, more genuine material reality. Relying on various degrees of abstraction, from language, image or drawing to computation or industrial manufacture, we actively participate in (re)producing a world with little awareness of what gets filtered, distorted or even completely overwritten.

1) installation overview; in the center a concrete footing and nylon strings define the 1:1 wireframe of a column (18 x 18 x 362 cm)


2) close-up, acrylic frame laser-engraved with fingerprints, next to adjacent specification typeset to mimic the displacement of the engravings (50 x 70 cm)


3) close-up, gabion lined with steel mesh and filled with EPS packing peanuts (20 x 20 x 100 cm)


4) close-up, MDF frame backing with agglomeration of steel D-rings for hanging (50 x 70cm)


5) close-up, specification for steel typeset to reveal the geological origin of iron ore, if one regards the label upside down

My contribution to a group show of the Rietveld Academie’s Architectural Design Department, featuring spatial research and proposals that center Afrikahuis, a structuralist church in Amsterdam’s De Pijp.


Alien to the surrounding 19th century Amsterdam buildings, Joop van Stigt’s 1968 Afrikahuis both stands out and hides in plain sight.

This project compiles various tools designed to help navigate its concealed geometry. The ultimate goal is increasing the building’s visibility in the neighborhood.

First, I study the ground floor, the concrete skeleton that upholds the wooden church. For a precise approach, I remove its walls and ceiling to expose it to the public.

Then, I catalogue its constituent elements and their relationship. The focus becomes that of a lexicon of the building and how to decipher it.

Lastly, I abstract the volumes, applying structuralist dichotomies such as inside-outside, positive-negative, and ultimately, visible-invisible.

Crate chair spin-off, adapted as temporary low furniture for the Rietveld Canteen. 

Featured in the book Rietvelds
academiegebouw: A living monument for artistic education (2024).

Built out of disassembled pallets and accompanied by instructions, silkscreened on a tag for each piece, so that students can use our tips to replicate the set with found materials.

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1) furniture set: armchair, bench & coffee table

2) manual with building instructions, materials required & time estimations 

3) close-up of coffe table

4) close-up of chair with imperfections of refurbished wood

5) furniture set featured in the book Rietvelds
academiegebouw: A living monument for artistic education

Site specific installation of a seven metre see-through fabric, hanging from my bedroom window for passerby to step on.

Material outcome of my engagement with the volume At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic
Space, particularly Irene Cieraad’s chapter Dutch Windows: Female Virtue and Female Vice.

A week long experiment in decontextualizing the curtain, to blur the boundary between public and private.

By exagerating its proportions, the curtain shifts away from being a precise border, a line without a volume, as it touches the ground and claims space.

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1) the curtain hanging on site, viewed on top of the roof


2) stills from a short clip showcasing the length of the piece


3) collage of curtain documentation as a closed path, collapsing its origin, the window, into public space


4) Bouttats, Gaspar, Emblema Sextum, Manent Illaesa (1681)

Assisting on a competiton entry of PolyLester Studio, commissioned by Rosenheim Technical University of Applied Sciences, with modelmaking and technical drawings for a public square proposal.

The model features lasercut MDF tiles, spray-painted terracotta and follows the grid of the original design, elevating elements that turn into seating, tables or parasols. 

A grid of trees also starts out as dense in the bottom left corner, but shifts, disrupted by the movment of the tiles. 

Amsterdam’s Begijnhof is known as the only surviving Catholic enclave during the Protestant reform of the 1500s.

The process of monumentalizing its courtyard involved spatial compromises, to accommodate both the circulation of tourists and some degree of privacy for the inhabitants.

Among the areas zoned off are two patches of grass, said to have been used as bleaching fields; spots where laundry would be washed and laid flat to dry and get lightened by the sun.

Regarded as a proto-feminist movement, the tradition of the beguinage decentered childbearing from women’s lives, granted protection from arranged marriages and sexual violence, collectively owned property and demanded remunerated work to gain financial independence from men. 

Yet, beguines were involved in practices of caretaking and maintenance of spaces, bodies, and objects, without being mothers or wives. Cleaning, cooking, mending, teaching, nursing...the medieval society depended on them to reproduce, whether they judged or approved of their choices.

In pursuit of reactivating the bleaching fields as a site of labor, my work turns towards undergarments, the only items washed regularly in the Middle Ages. Enduring the most wear and tear, absorbing odors, being patched constantly, they mirror the resilience of generations of women that inhabited the Begijnhof.

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1) speculative model of The Begijnhof, isolating the bleaching fields, omitting the buildings and turning surrounding streets back into canals

2) current-day site plan of Begijnhof, alongside images courtesy of City Archives Amsterdam

3) experiments around lightening cotton using both gentle and chemical bleaching agents

4) grass stained undergarments (from left to right):

- full length chemise with drawstring neckline

- empire waist shift with adjustable bust

- skirted bra with “breast cups” and side lacing

5) lookbook of garments with close-ups of their details; rouching, closures, finishings

Website compiling personal fieldnotes and speculations on the politics of commuting, distributed via more than 100 QR codes I’ve stuck on NS property in the span of a month.

Themes also include reproductive labour and the Amsterdam housing crisis, paired with humorous visuals questioning how the space of the train could tend towards them.

I wrote it anonymously, as an open letter to people I share my daily train ride with.

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1) QR codes leading to the mobile website of A Daily Commuter, overlayed on top of a photographed train schedule

2) drawings exaggerating the concept of a “domestic train”

3) message exchanges between me and my partner as one of the first prompts for the project

4) fragments from the text & visuals featured on the website, screenshoted

Assisting on the exhibiton design for Mysterious
Universe, a group show of Gabriel Lester and Eugène Brands at museum van Bommel van Dam, Venlo.

The works are showcased across two rooms, one pitch dark and one well lit. Between them, a perforated series of parallel walls serves as a tunneled transiton. 

Over the span of a couple of months, I was requested to develop the final manufacturing files for this particular section of the show, guided by initial technical drawings of the design. I worked on splitting the walls, fitting them on more than 100 MDF plates and testing various styles of linework for the CNC cutouts. 

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1) work in progress: sample of CNC cut

2) wall example from original design, drawing and models by
Darya Akhrameika

3) puzzling sections of walls as economically as possible on the maximum size of the MDF plates

4) exhibiton build-up, museum van Bommel van Dam

5)  detail of wall on the evening of the official exhibiton opening