Madelon Vriesendorp

PROJECT: Madelon Vriesendorp Profile Films

CLIENT: Sir John Soane’s Museum

COLLABORATORS: Madelon Vriesendorp

YEARS: 2025-2026

Architectural artist Madelon Vriesendorp was awarded the 2025 Soane Medal for her longstanding contribution to architectural drawing, followed a year later by Mind Games, a major retrospective exploring her surreal and playful practice. Aetia was initially brought on to direct and produce a short documentary film to introduce Vriesendorp and market her guest lecture. Our job was to capture a long and impressive biography while driving audiences to engage with Madelon’s work in person. Rather than approaching her story through achievements and credentials, we became interested in the person behind the work: her way of seeing, her relationship with objects, and the playful intelligence that has carried through her practice. 

The resulting film became an intimate portrait shaped around Madelon’s stories, observations and home studio, rather than a conventional institutional profile. It generated 83% more views than the Museum’s Soane Medal film the previous year, received wide press coverage, including in Dezeen, and helped the lecture sell out in record time. We were brought back on board in 2026 to recut the film for the museum’s retrospective, Madelon Vriesendorp: Mind Games, where it became a key piece of the exhibition’s digital storytelling and featured on Bloomberg Connects.

This project brought us so much joy and inspiration. It reinforced that an individual’s unique character can be the key to unlocking an audience’s interest in wide bodies of work and highly specialised subjects, and that short film can become a portal to tangible audience engagement in offline and in longer form.