Jóia Maria Boode (1998) was born and raised in Amsterdam, but moved to Maastricht (2019)  where she followed and graduated with honors from Interdisciplinary Arts (BA) at the Art Academy in June 2022. At the moment she is based in Vienna (Austria) where she follows an STS Master's program (MA), and works in the Netherlands as a documentary maker. Her projects mainly focus on sustainability and education.

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"We live in a world where large scale industrialization and technological progress are developing so fast that more and more people feel unhinged and out of control. The faster the developments go, the more there is possible, the less people trust science and the more people feel like wanting to escape the fast pace of the modern industrial lifestyle. The way we live right now is not only taking a toll on our personal well-being, but also on the planet we live on; its resources and biodiversity, on which we, humans are highly dependent.

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I feel a need to find my place in this world, to build a home where I feel safe.

My interests reflect my ever-going search for my position in the world, both figuratively as well as literally speaking. I am a maker, a journalist and a storyteller. The stories I tell are based on research, my life and on the stories of others. I combine the stories and translate them artistically in such a way that others can relate to them. My creativity is in the way I think and interpret the input that I am getting. In my work I apply methods from social design and combine them with my knowledge of evolution, ethology (behavioral biology) and the sociological influences of technology and innovation.

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My background in biology and my job as a researcher for botanist and artist Stefan Cools have provided me with the necessary tools to include these fields of research. Despite my deep desire for theoretical research, my greatest source of inspiration are personal stories. This is not just because they trigger an emotional response, but because it creates the connection between science, research and the real world. It makes the problems we read and hear about real and tangible.

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I use my free and artistic thought process to try to understand the broad outlines of human behavior and, most importantly, my own. I believe all research stems from a need to understand our heritage, ourselves.

 

As an interdisciplinary being at heart, I will continue to use the disciplines described above, and deepen my zest for adventure in my future projects. My main focus at the moment lies with documentary making, and specifically on  how to use storytelling through documentary making as a research tool in itself."

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Jóia

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