Originally published 2020-05-23.
At 10 p.m. on 5 May 2020, Liberation Day in the Netherlands, 300 illuminated drones rose above the River Maas in Rotterdam and moved together like a flock of birds. The performance, called Franchise Freedom, was created by the Dutch artist duo DRIFT as a tribute to freedom and to the people protecting other people's health during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially staff in hospitals and care homes. Because crowds could not gather, the show was made to be watched live on television and online.
It was a quietly powerful moment. The 75th anniversary of the end of the German occupation should have been marked with festivals across the country, and instead most of the Netherlands was at home. Below we look at what the drones did, who DRIFT are, why this particular date mattered, and how a light show can carry a message about freedom and dependence on one another. You can watch the full performance in the video further down.
What happened over the Maas on 5 May 2020
The swarm took off over the river in the heart of Rotterdam, with the city's illuminated Erasmus Bridge and skyline as a backdrop. Each drone carried a bright light, and together they formed slowly shifting clouds, waves and shapes against the night sky, including a glowing heart in the colours of the drones' lights.
The soundtrack was live: Dutch pianist Joep Beving played from Erasmus MC, the city's university hospital, a direct link between the performance and the medical staff it honoured. The project was initiated with the art organisation Mothership and supported by a broad group of local partners, including the Port of Rotterdam Authority, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Municipality of Rotterdam and Rotterdam Partners, the city's marketing and promotion agency.
For a city that knows the cost of war well, the setting mattered. Rotterdam's centre was largely destroyed by German bombing in May 1940, and much of the skyline the drones flew over was built in the decades of reconstruction that followed.
Why 5 May matters in the Netherlands
Liberation Day, or Bevrijdingsdag, marks the end of the German occupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War. On 5 May 1945, at the Hotel de Wereld in Wageningen, Canadian and German commanders agreed on the surrender of German forces in the country, and the formal document was signed there the next day.
The day follows the National Remembrance of the Dead on 4 May, when the country holds two minutes of silence at 8 p.m. for those who died in war and peacekeeping operations. The pairing is deliberate: first remembering, then celebrating freedom. Liberation Day was originally a holiday every five years and has been celebrated annually since 1990, usually with liberation festivals across the country, veterans' parades and a televised concert in Amsterdam.
In 2020, the 75th anniversary, almost all of those events were cancelled or moved online because of pandemic restrictions. Franchise Freedom became one of the few large public moments that could still take place, precisely because people did not need to be together to share it.
Who are DRIFT?
DRIFT is the Amsterdam studio of Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta, who met at the Design Academy Eindhoven and founded the studio in 2007. Their work sits between art, design and technology, and it often borrows directly from nature.
Some of their best-known pieces include:
- Fragile Future, Gordijn's graduation project, a structure of LED lamps covered with real dandelion seeds glued on by hand. Versions are in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum and the V&A.
- Shylight, flower-like lamps that open and close as they fall and rise, installed in the Rijksmuseum when its renovated Philips Wing reopened in 2014.
- Drifter, a large concrete block that appears to float through a room, shown at the Armory Show in New York in 2017.
- Ego, a kinetic sculpture first shown at PACE Gallery in New York in 2020.
The studio held its first solo museum exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 2018.
Franchise Freedom: a flock made of light
Franchise Freedom was not created for the pandemic. It premiered in December 2017 at Art Basel Miami Beach, where about 300 drones formed a flying light sculpture, and it grew out of DRIFT's earlier Flylight installation, a ceiling of lights that imitated a flock of starlings. The project was made with the studio's drone partner, Drone Stories, and went on to win several design prizes, including Dezeen Awards in 2019.
The idea behind it comes from murmurations, the vast, swirling flocks of starlings that seem to move as one. No single bird leads. Each one reacts to its nearest neighbours, and the shape of the whole flock emerges from those small decisions. DRIFT's drones follow a pre-programmed algorithm based on research into this kind of collective behaviour, so the swarm appears to breathe, contract and expand as a living thing would.
That is where the title comes from. The artists have described the work as an exploration of the tension between individual freedom and belonging to a group: each drone has room to move, but only within the safety of the swarm. In spring 2020 the metaphor needed no explanation. Staying at home, keeping distance and relying on health workers were all ways in which individual choices protected the group, and the group in turn protected individuals.
Press coverage at the time quoted Ralph Nauta saying the pandemic made it clear how much people depend on each other, and Lonneke Gordijn reflecting that nature offers a reliable direction in uncertain times.
How drone light shows work
If you have seen a drone show at a festival or New Year's celebration, you may wonder how hundreds of small aircraft avoid crashing into each other. The answer is careful choreography rather than drones thinking for themselves.
- Pre-planned paths. Designers create the animation in software, which converts each frame into a precise flight path for every drone.
- Accurate positioning. The drones use satellite positioning, often corrected by a ground station, to hold their place in the sky within centimetres.
- Central control. A ground team monitors the fleet, with safety rules such as geofencing that keep drones inside an approved area.
- Permits. Shows over cities need approval from aviation authorities and careful planning around weather and wind.
DRIFT's version is unusual because its motion is designed to look organic and unpredictable, closer to a flock of birds than to the logos and shapes common in commercial drone shows. We have covered other remarkable uses of the technology, from drone footage of sea turtles coming ashore to a man walking his dog by drone during lockdown in Cyprus.
A shared moment while apart
The performance lasted only a few minutes, but it captured something that many people felt in that first pandemic spring: that even while isolated, we were still part of something larger. Residents near the river could see it from home, and everyone else could follow it on television or a phone, and for a short time attention was focused on the same patch of sky.
That is perhaps the best case for public art in a crisis. It cannot cure anything, but it can give people a reason to look up together, and in Rotterdam on the evening of 5 May 2020, it turned a cancelled celebration into one of the most memorable images of that year's Liberation Day.
Sources: Rotterdam Partners press release; Wikipedia: Studio Drift; Wikipedia: Liberation Day (Netherlands); Video of the performance.
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