Touki Delphine
Superdrum
With SUPERDRUM, boundary-pushing Dutch collective Touki Delphine transforms more than one hundred drums into a giant interconnected, self-playing instrument. Drawing on the drum’s ancient role as a tool for communication, the installation creates a dense landscape of rhythm, light, and movement.
During their residency at PS21, Touki Delphine worked with the local community to source more than one hundred second-hand drums, each carrying traces of its previous life through dents, discolorations, and band logos. The artists also gathered twigs and sticks from PS21’s surrounding woods, using them to strike the electronically controlled drums. In this way, both the community and the landscape became embedded in the material and sonic life of the work.
The residency supported the development of SUPERDRUM ahead of its US premiere at PS21’s COMMONGROUND Festival, bringing together electronics, found materials, and more than one hundred individual instruments into a collective, pulsating body.
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.
Touki Delphine is known for transforming discarded materials into powerful musical installations. In FIREBIRD, a unique orchestra of over 600 recycled taillights unleashes a hypnotic choreography of light and sound, transforming Stravinsky’s classic Firebird Suite into an otherworldly experience. In RELAY, 1848 turn signal relay motors create rhythm and harmony. In MACHINE, a second hand plant-potting machine is transformed into the drummer of an ensemble. For TRANSMISSION, miles of scrapped wiring and pneumatic tubing mimic an underground fungal network that hums and vibrates electrically. And DRIFTING, the breakout hit of the 2025 Dutch festival summer, is a new ecosystem built from nothing but waste: ethernet cables from thrift shops, windshield washer fluid reservoirs and their pump motors from junkyards, and salvaged speaker cables from Touki’s own studio. The piece comes alive in live sessions, where musicians engage in dialogue with the installation.