Metamorphoses Rijksmuseum
For the exhibition Metamorphoses at the Rijksmuseum, we made an audio tour in Dutch and English together with Stephen Fry. The exhibition shows more than eighty masterpieces inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, in collaboration with the Galleria Borghese in Rome. The tour takes you past 22 stops full of myths about people, gods and a world that keeps changing.
Challenge
Ovid wrote his Metamorphoses in fifteen books. The poem tells the history of the world up to just after the year zero, from the creation out of Chaos to the deification of Julius Caesar. Artists have drawn inspiration from it for centuries, and at the Rijksmuseum their work now hangs side by side: paintings, sculpture, goldsmith's work, ceramics, photography and video art.
That is a lot to see and understand in one visit. The audio tour had to guide visitors through the galleries and let them hear the myths behind the artworks.
Result
Together with Stephen Fry, author of Mythos, we made an audio tour that takes you through these wondrous transformations. The tour has 22 stops, with an intro and an outro. Stephen Fry narrated the English version remotely. Jacqueline Blom narrated the Dutch version in our studio. You also hear the harp of Lavinia Meijer, playing music from The Hours that we selected and adapted for the tour. There is also a low-stimulus version in Dutch and English, so that more visitors can enjoy the tour. The tour was available through the Rijksmuseum app.
So you hear the stories while walking past works like the video installation of Medusa, half human, half snake. The exhibition ran from 6 February to 25 May 2026.
Thanks to the Rijksmuseum, Inge Willemsen, Stephen Fry, Jacqueline Blom, Lavinia Meijer and Rik Rensen.
