Send message to Contributors

Contribution short abstract

This installation centers on the Rhine River, contrasting eDNA analysis with visitor reflections to explore what’s left out of both ecological data and ethnographic display. Evolving with each new contribution, it invites a more layered view of the river and its many entangled histories.

Contribution long abstract

This interactive multimedia installation centers on the Rhine River as both a site of scientific analysis and lived experience. It explores how rivers become knowable through environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling—a method that reveals biological traces invisible to the human eye. While eDNA allows scientists to reconstruct food webs and assess biodiversity, it also abstracts life into genetic code, distancing it from broader ecological and cultural contexts.

Developed through a collaboration between an ecologist and an anthropologist within the University of Oulu’s SAFIRE program for ecosystem restoration, the work asks what gets left out when rivers are reduced to scientific data. As eDNA reveals the biological residues of ecosystem-borne interactions, the installation mirrors methods for detecting the unseen by linking it to the social, historical, and material traces of human–river relations.

Installed at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, the piece also shifts the museum’s ethnographic lens—typically trained on distant cultures and geographies—toward a local landmark: the Rhine. Integrating visitor-collected water samples (and thus changing over time), along with personal reflections, scientific diagrams, and archival materials, the installation invites audiences to participate in scientific and museum-based knowledge-making processes typically closed to them.

It highlights the link between ecological science and the diverse ways people experience the river, seeking to make visible not only the biological abstraction of ecological data, but also the river’s entanglements with human histories and more-than-human life.