Concept & Creative Direction | We Own The Night, NIKE (Amsterdam)
Creative Director: Catarina Aimée Dahms
Designer & Art Director: Alexander Dahms
Production Manager: Nahuel Blaton
Live Performance: Cata.Pirata & The Sweethearts & DJ Maximin

Commissioned by NIKE for the We Own The Night Women’s 10km Run in Amsterdam, this project was conceived as an immersive, interdisciplinary performance environment designed to transform a mass participation sporting event into a narrative, sensory, and emotionally engaging experience.

As Concept and Creative Director, I developed an interactive audio-visual journey that blended mythological storytelling, live music performance, spatial sound design, and large-scale installation. Drawing inspiration from Nuit, the Egyptian Goddess of the Stars, the work framed the runners’ route as a symbolic rite of passage centred around empowerment, endurance, and collective energy.

Participants entered the experience through The Goddess Gate, a hybrid installation and live performance environment combining layered visual collage, choreographed performers, and dynamic sound elements. This threshold functioned as both a narrative entry point and an interactive sonic encounter, designed to heighten anticipation and emotional engagement through responsive musical and visual stimuli.

Following this, runners passed through the Temple Oasis, a multisensory installation featuring atmospheric sound design and environmental mist effects, conceived as a restorative spatial intervention. This section used sound, temperature, and atmosphere as compositional tools to influence participants’ physical and psychological states, encouraging renewed focus and connection to personal and collective strength.

The project required extensive collaboration across creative, technical, and corporate stakeholders, translating artistic research into a large-scale public experience for thousands of participants. It demonstrates my practice-led approach to interactive composition, where sound, performance, and environment operate as interconnected systems that respond to audience movement and participation.

This work reflects my broader research interests in immersive storytelling, adaptive performance environments, and the role of music and sound in shaping experiential and socially engaged public art contexts.