** expanded portfolio is available upon request**

Titology: Prodigal Shelter

Year: 2025-ongoing
Research development: Rachel Refael and Rebecca Schedler

Titology: Prodigal Shelter positions the breast as a critical spatial and symbolic form, moving beyond conventional associations with eroticism or nurture to explore its architectural and political dimensions. The installation presents the breast as a site of embodied tension, shifting between care and discomfort, intimacy and aversion, dependency and refusal. Within this framework, shelter becomes a space of confrontation, where maternal structures are unsettled, bodily myths come into focus, and queer spatiality emerges through soft, excessive, and impermanent forms.

WORMnest: A Habitat for the Strange

Year: 2025
Research and Curation: Rebecca Schedler
Design development + production: Rachel Refael, Rebecca Schedler

Exhibited at: Worm Rotterdam

WORMnest transforms the Boomgaardstraat building into a sentient, shape-shifting organism as part of the Wunderbar Window Expo series. This window installation dissolves the boundaries between body and architecture, nightlife and anatomy. Latex organs pulse, conversations ferment, and viscous flows circulate, reimagining the bar as a living entity that absorbs, digests, and evolves with each encounter. WORMnest offers a glimpse into a space where interiors surface and the night reveals a fleshy, fluid core.

Peeping Spaces: A Queer Historical Perspective of 'De Wallen'

Year: 2024
Research and Curation: Rachel Refael, Gavin Oliver O’Leary
Design development: Rachel Refael, Gavin Oliver O’Leary
Contributing Researchers and artists: Milena Sekulic, Prostitution Information Center
Production Management: Eva Garibaldi
Advisory: Pol Esteve Castello
Photos by: Eric Stynes

Exhibited at : ARCAM (Centrum voor Architectuur)
Texts by: Rachel Refael, Sjaan van der Tol
Supported by: BlueCity, Stimulerings Fonds, Centrum voor Architectuur, FRONT® (formerly StoneCycling)

‘Peeping Spaces‘ is a research-driven, archival-based exhibition and community engagement project that explores the history of erasure and persecution of sex-based spaces in Amsterdam’s De Wallen district amidst recent urban redevelopment.

This project aims to elevate marginalized voices and confront exclusionary narratives by exposing viewers to informal histories. By weaving together historical narratives, architectural analysis, and archival research, ‘Peeping Spaces’ documents the cultural significance of given spaces. It champions the preservation of diverse urban landscapes and the need for more inclusive planning practices.

The exhibition featured contributions from members of the Prostitution Information Center (PIC), who shared valuable insights and perspectives. The project was part of Open Monumentendag 2024 and Amsterdam Museum Nacht 2024, produced by the Pleasure Society.

Open Call for : Oman Cultural Complex construction inauguration pavilion

Year: 2023
Concept development: Rachel Refael, Mila Sekulic
Concept production: Rachel Refael
Renders by: Rachel Refael

The Oman Cultural Complex (OCC) marks a significant milestone in the nation's commitment to cultural preservation, artistic innovation, and historical appreciation. To honor the commencement of its construction, this proposal for the inauguration pavilion serves as a symbolic and experiential space, offering visitors a glimpse into the future of the complex while rooting them in its cultural legacy. The pavilion functions as an immersive and interactive structure, embodying Oman's rich heritage and contemporary aspirations by incorporating traditional architectural elements with modern materials and technologies.

Year: 2021
Research and Design: Rachel Refael
Project: Graduation Project
Supervisors: Ephraim Joris, Federico Martelli
Photos by: Chiara Catalini

Exhibited at: Manifestations, Dutch Design Week 2021
Texts by: Rachel Refael
Supported by: Van Beek Donner Stichting, MIARD Alumni Research Award

“Made to Disappear” explores the living room as a site of performance influenced by the forced exclusion of sex work from the public sphere under Bill C-36. This project is based on interviews with a Canadian sex worker, and her spatial negotiation within the home.

By researching the division of private and public spaces for sex workers operating within domestic interiors, the project explores the living room both as a heterotopic realm and as a domestic extension of the Polis. While being either disposable or easily sterilized, all the materiality in this project carries foreign traces into the idea of domesticity. It strips the space of ornamental comfort through multiple spatial references such as; massage parlours, bachelor pads, and clinical sites.

Year: 2020
Design Research and Concept : Rachel Refael
Project: Research project
Supervisors: Federico Martelli, cookies.lol
Field Research: Rachel Refael, Noel Ingeveldt, Angelo Ciccaglione, Katharina Kasinger

Visuals by: Rachel Refael

Exhibited at: Hofbogen, Rotterdam

The project began with a series of interviews with local musicians from the Agniesebuurt neighborhood, documenting their experiences, challenges, and ambitions. These insights were then transformed into a spatial and chronological map of Vijverhofstraat, illustrating the evolving connection between music culture and the urban landscape.

Agniesebuurt has recently emerged as a dynamic hub for up-and-coming musicians, often featured in lyrics and music videos. However, the neighborhood is facing the effects of commercial development, gentrification, and the ongoing pandemic, which have led to a loss of accessible performance and production spaces for artists.

This design addresses two main challenges. First, it creates a public stage for musicians, designed to enhance visibility and maximize audience engagement through an outward-facing performance setup. Second, it offers interactive interiors where musicians can personalize spatial platforms for music video production, live-streamed performances, and virtual events, providing a versatile space for creative expression.

Shellshock: Intertidal Gardens

Year: 2020
Project: Research project
Supervisors: Studio Ossidiana
Research and design: Rachel Refael

Visuals by: Rachel Refael

Exhibited: Online

A garden is a composed and cultivated space, created for reflection, nourishment, and retreat. It softens the boundary between interior and exterior, offering a moment of stillness while asserting human control over nature. Across time, gardens have reflected not only aesthetic desires but also histories of migration, colonization, and land appropriation. In many Western traditions, land that is left untended is seen as empty or unproductive.

This project responds to these histories by reimagining the garden through water. In the context of the Maasvlakte, a landscape formed through human intervention that has displaced native species, it introduces an aquatic space shaped by both human presence and non-human life. Drawing from ancient practices of aquaculture, the space invites visitors into a living system where marine organisms gradually reshape the environment.

Although rooted in human tradition, the garden is sustained and transformed by other species. Each element reflects a different vision of care, cultivation, and cohabitation.

T.1883.1411

Year: 2019
Project: Research project
Supervisors: Dr. Ephraim Joris
Design research and production: Eva Garibaldi, Rachel Refael

Exhibited at: Wijk COOP 010, Rotterdam

This project presents an archived meta-object by its absence. Hence, taking on a post-structural approach to the duality within museums while dealing with their colonial past as well as their violent nature. By introducing the black mirror , T.1883.1411 gives a glimpse of the “archive” without letting the viewer approach it. Due to the concrete mass floating on top of the black mirror, it dissociates itself from romanticizing the notion of the curated intellect of the art and historical institutions. The final element is a point cloud of the meta-relic floating, dispersing, on the concrete cube; by that, representing the active absence of archival knowledge both in the digital and the physical world.

T.1883.1411 is an acknowledgement of the truancy within the curatorial work of institutions; with an emphasis on the problematic nature of ethnographic museums. By veiling the objects, or omitting them from their purposeful place, museums reject the meaning and the tactile nature of the relics in them.