A biography of inflatable structures for multisensory immersion, from early experiments to current compositions.

Renaissance builders called it pneuma – air as breath, spirit, building material. Pneuma links body, architecture, and the cosmos, as the building comes to mediate between inhabitant and world, interior breath and exterior air.

Imagine buildings that are lighter, more mobile, flexible, portable, and engaged in a reciprocal relationship with their surroundings and the elements. Imagine that we can create our homes or shelters wherever our heart is, with no fixed form, without spatial and temporal beginnings and endings.
Lightness as a state of Being

Including images and textual reminiscences of working with inflatables, a lineage spanning two decades and several continents; from the early experiments with costumes for responsive environments to full-scale inflatable venues for choreographies, ritual journeys and audio-visual performances, including Curve, Sphæræ and UMAA

“Ancestors”? From each encounter, something passes into the next – how wind moves through fabric, pressure finds its own distribution, what air can do under constraint. These structures speak across decades, each teaching how the membrane responds to touch and weather.

Italo Calvino talks about lightness in one of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, where he describes a scene from Cervantes’ novel in which Don Quixote drives his lance through the sail of a windmill – a moment where the structure asserts its own force, lifting the human beyond his control.

Wing-dress (2000-2002): Air currents, body and fabric move together. The dress volume is tailor-made for the wind: too small or too large, and not much happens. To support these infinite movement variations, these endless forms, its proportions and material need to be just right. Space Auditorium (2003): A performance-activated inflatable space, developed with Theo Botschuijver for Theater aan Zee in IJmuiden. Higher pressure below pushes against lower pressure above, creating two worlds separated by a malleable floor. Guy van Belle experimented with how sound could animate architectural membranes, making the first floor a resonating surface. A surface responding to weight and movement, capable of holding up to 80 people. When someone forgot to close the lower exit one evening, the audience sank down in one big pile. Some people thought it was part of an amazing show. Tension workshop (2004): Exploring physical forces at FoAM Brussels. Artists and engineers gathered to probe how surface tension, tensegrity, twists, knots, nets, inflation and elasticity could create self-sustaining lightweight structures. Here, we were testing chemical reactions as means of inflation alongside mechanical tensile systems. Prototypes, models, and full-scale structures taught us different negotiations with gravity – some failing beautifully, others revealing new possibilities for wearable, mobile, temporary architectures. Inflatable Skins (2002): Costumes capable of transforming audience members into archetypal characters, designed and tested during FoAM’s Play Lab on Open Grown Territories. Photo by Nathalie van Helvoort, Inflatable Skins Whirly Wind (2009): Wind-form studies with design students at Fremantle beach, for Fremantle on the EDGE. Translucent sheets traced local air currents, two-dimensional membranes transformed into 3D sculptures by capturing the patterns of wind. The challenge: finding the right colour, pattern, weight and materiality for the environment. The best performances happened when the Fremantle Doctor arrived – the beloved afternoon sea breeze that brings relief from Perth's summer heat, and animated our membranes. I would love to design more of these big sheets, which allow groups to compose movement. Shelter (2016): Wind-breakers, shaped by the wind. Experimenting with pliable shielding architecture on Zandmotor, alongside MAD (Materialisation in Art & Design) students, discovering how protective structures could collaborate with environmental forces. Airport Seppe (2011), Performing in a red/white twisted wind-tunnel at Breda’s Seppe Airport. This was the first time I used a bright colour in an immersive inflatable, the red-white striping intensifying disorientation as participants walked against the wind to meet wind-swept air hostesses. Balloon Dress (2003): The wearer’s breath controls light intensity within a semi-transparent envelope, creating a soft interface between the body and surrounding space. Developed with antigravity artist Camila Valenzuela during the Illumine residency, and performed at Surface Tension, breathing became visible as an architectural force, translating internal rhythms into external effects. White Sands, Silver Heat (2012): Field experiment at New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Test Facility, where heat, sand, reflective shield and sky melted together. Disorientation through twisted reflections – sand melting above, sky trembling below. Where does one end and the other begin? The black stripes were slightly heavier than the white fabric, causing a fascinating falling rhythmic pattern as the shape naturally deflated. Sphæræ learned to adapt to different climates through different cover types – black for cold weather, silver for heat, each generating its own interior conditions. The silver created pitch darkness inside even under Californian summer sun, while the felt floor provided comfort, echoing yurt-like architecture. Anchoring became a negotiation with buoyancy: three large stones positioned at optimal pressure points, ready to float if the structure became too buoyant. Audiences inside Sphæræ experiencing “10,000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid” where Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand used laser light to scan the surfaces of nucleating and dissipating soap bubble clusters. The dome amplified these microscopic interactions into immersive projections, an instrument for translating molecular events. Photo by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times Sphæræ was designed as a platform for artists, scientists, and performers to create 180° works exploring light, sound and movement within the domes. Over five years, each residency taught us something new about what the dome could do.William Basinski revealed how the acoustic geometry stretched sound across time. Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand's soap bubble projections found perfect resonance with the architectural forms that inspired them.Julie Tolentino's movement investigations showed how bodies could collaborate with curved surfaces to generate new choreographic possibilities. CURVE (2015–2024): A walkable sculpture entered alone, on foot – the body sucked into a tunnel where the outside world dissolves. A disorientation – following your own footsteps, as light, sound, material merge. Co-created with Schweigman&, CURVE concentrated decades of experiments into a single passage, shifting awareness through spatial constraint. Curve’s white tunnel based on the Ganzfeldt effect. Sinking in Between (2020): The inflatable is made of a reflective material that collaborates with water droplets and light, generating iridescent colours that echo ice crystals. The floating form changes colour, shape and shadow, shifting through different phases of light during the composition. Co-created with Nicky Assmann as an exploration of how air, liquid and light interfere. Performed at Lightforms Festival, Rotterdam.

Kite-Dress (2002–2007): I’m hoisted into the air wearing a 60-foot long dress, held up by six Conyne kites that Patrick de Koning configured for lifting human weight. The kite-dress likes to write sculptural gestures in the air, uplifting the audience and fulfilling my dream of flying. Five successful flights so far. Before the first lift-off, I didn't speak for a week. Being suspended from a kite, how will that work? I could feel the system’s tension already working through my body. Anchored by a small truck, the wind dictates the flight’s height and duration. Launch and landing require a group of people prepared to read the kite’s moods. Sometimes we waited days for the kite to find its wind. Then, once airborne, tension on the thin wire made sounds like a long violin string. Scapes – Frozen: A simple open cushion inflatable from a collection of wind-activated, site sensitive experiments. Two sheets of material were taped together the night before, seeing what space might emerge. On the frozen Dutch lake, among ice skaters and birds, partial inflation discovered a capacity for dance. Scooping up air, releasing, moving with wind over the mirror surface. Stripe (2010-2014): A striped, inflatable cube inspired by Marken’s floating architecture – the island just above Amsterdam where legend claims houses sailed to Denmark in a 1916 storm. This form found its way into multiple contexts, each echoing the original building’s relationship to water and weather. Calibrated to local rhythms, it blended so completely that local residents felt it to have been there forever, the recurring structure becoming part of local memory. Inflatable Meeting Room (2004): A public experiment emerging from the Tension Workshop’s pneumatic turmoil. The chamber’s constraints pressed bodies together, three faces meeting in shared breath. Meetings in a sealed triangle. TRG (2005): A black topological island with three holes, rising from a soft floor. Stretch sensors translate movements into soundwaves. As the resulting subwoofer vibrations travelled through the membrane, bodies settled deeper into the undulating surface. Bungee-cube (2002-2005): Audience members wear the inflatable cube, launched across space via bungee cord – landing in airbags, bouncing up again. Club-goers lined up for the pneumatic cushioning that turned collision into play. The concept emerged from earlier experiments at Great Yarmouth's Hippodrome circus, where participants shot across the circus arena, wearable structures and circus space both tracking and amplifying their movements, as part of the txOom responsive environment. Konstfack students, slowly filling up a material fair in Stockholm. Another white cube with black stripes, the form finding its way back. Sphæræ’s first entrance test. Sphæræ (2013–2018), FoAM froth and soap-bubble architectures. Research into minimal surfaces made me wonder what it would feel like to walk inside such forms. This became Sphæræ, a multidome inflatable pavilion where audiences and performers discovered how 360-degree surfaces could work with sound and light. For decades after the 1960s, audiences stayed outside inflatables. Bringing people back inside required crafting precise protocols for multiple scenarios, conversations with regulators helping us refine our safety procedures in real time. Sphæræ revealed a complex whisper-dome effect, with weird resonance points that shifted when the structure moved with the wind. Paul Prudence, Dmitry Gelfand and ArtScience students worked together to perfect a 360 projection set-up with spherical mirrors. Nobody could advise about its sonic properties; we only had one attempt to get it right, learning its voice through direct encounter. Sphæræ standing in the fields of my hometown of Eemnes, in the Netherlands. Entrance transition that our team called het vagijntje. Entry required passing through a constricted opening, pressing bodies into intimate contact with the membrane before releasing them into the expanded interior. Prototyping UMAA’s first form – testing how Sphæræ's multi-dome discoveries could scale and transform, revealing new relationships between size, stability, and spatial possibility. UMAA (2024), or Unité Mobile d'Action Artistique, emerged from weeks of testing the original Sphæræ space, turning it inside out, learning from Julie Tolentino's Los Angeles experiments where dancers unzipped the space during performance, deconstructing dome into flowing membranes. This taught us how pneumatic structures could dance – boundaries between audience, performer and space dissolving. UMAA scales itself to each venue's possibilities, functioning as base camp for ephemeral communities. Choreographic karaoke by Olivia Grandville projected on UMAA, the surface as both screen and stage. The very first audience visit to UMAA, visitors and structure learning how to dwell and move.

Close Collaborators

Kite Dress: Patrick de Koning (NL), Frozen: the frozen Eemmeer lake, Space Auditorium: Theo Botschuijver (NL), Arianne en Koen van Tuijl (NL), Stripe: performers Ludmila Rodrigues (NL), Wen Chin Fu (NL), Tension workshop: Patrick de Koning (NL), Anna Rewakowicz (PL), Hiaz Gmachl (AT/UK), Rachel Wingfield (UK), Theun Karelse (NL), Linda Karlson (SE), Heath Bunting (UK), Kayle Brandon (UK), Ruben Bus (NL), Maja Kuzmanovic (NL/HR), Nik Gaffney (AU/BE), Lina Kusaite (LT/BE). TRG: Maja Kuzmanovic (NL/HR), Nik Gaffney (AU/BE), Theun Karelse (NL), Stephen Pickles (AU), Lina Kusaite (LT/BE). Inflatable Skins: Lina Kusaite (LT/BE), Maja Kuzmanovic (NL/HR), model Tessa Joosse (NL), Whirly Wind: in parallel with Maria Blaisse (NL), Bungee Cube: Ruben Bus (NL) Shelter: on invitation by Maurizio Montalti (NL), Airport Seppe: Ed van Hinte (NL) performers: Silvia Janoskova (NL), Ludmilla Rodrigues (NL), Gabey Tjon a Tham (NL), Inflatable Skins: performers: Camila Valenzuela (CL), Isabel Rocamora (UK), AV media: Nik Gaffney (AU/BE), Maja Kuzmanovic (NL/HR) Stripe: performers: Kenzo Kusuda (NL), Aki Onda (JP), Gertjan Prins (NL), Le Vide et la lumiere: Patrick Gyger (FR), Evelina Domnitch (NL), Dmitry Gelfand (NL), Blaas: Boukje Schweigman (NL), Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti (NL), Jochem van Tol (NL), Jurr van Diggele (NL), Sphæræ: Robert Crouch (US), Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand, (BY/NL), William Basinski (US), Richard Chartier (US), Valekriy (NL), Francisco López (NL/ES), Raphael Vanoli (NL), Nenad Popov (NL), Erfan Abdi (NL), Barbara Ellison (NL), Paul Prudence (UK), O.M.F.O.(NL). Martijn van Boven (NL), E Jet Smits (NL), duard Haiman, Michael Holub, Ingrid Lee (US/CN), V4W.ENKO & Vadim Smakhtin (RU/UA), Bas van Koolwijk (NL), Robert Curgenven (AU), Robin Koek (NL), Micha Daams & Philip Vermeulen (NL), Matthijs Munnik (NL), Eric Parren (US), Matteo Marangoni, (IT) Yolanda Uriz (ES), Lola Bezemer (NL), Mike Rijnierse & Rob Bothof (NL), Joris Strijbos & Yamila Rios (NL), Dieter Vandoren & Mariska de Groot (BE/NL) Arthur I. Miller (US), Chris Duncan (US), Big City Forum with Soo Kim and Connie Samaras (US), Jeff Cain with Ezekiel Honig (US), France Jobin + Fabio Perletta with xx+xy visuals, Theun Karelse (NL), Mattia Casalegno (US), Intimatchine (US), David O’Brien, Christopher O’Leary with Isaac Schankler (US), Lucky Dragons (US), Mike Harding/Touch (US), Yann Novak (US), Steve Roden (US), Julie Tolentino (US) and Virons (US). Curve: Boukje Schweigman (NL), Erik van Dongen (NL), Rutger Zuydervelt (NL), Stephan Valk (NL), Rein (NL), Sinking in Between: Nicky Assmann (NL), UMAA: Olivia Grandville (FR), Aurelie Gillson (FR), Alexandre Bourbonnais (FR), Nathalie Nillas (FR).

And many more…