Haunted Waters on show at Rian Design Museum, Sweden

What’s new

The artwork Haunted Waters by Nonhuman Nonsense is now on display at the Rian Design Museum (Sweden). The installation invites visitors to the Haunted Waters Bar, a growing collection of contaminated waters submitted by activists, scientists, and citizens from around the world. Each sample carries its own “spirits”, invisible chemicals that haunt our ecosystems and bodies.

Developed during a SciArt residency at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in 2023–24, the project was created in collaboration with JRC scientist Caterina Cacciatori, whose work at the Water Quality Lab in Ispra focuses on monitoring chemical contamination. Together, they explore how science and art can reveal, and re-enchant, our relationship with the planet’s most essential element: water.

About the exhibition

Haunted Waters invites visitors to explore a growing collection of contaminated waters from around the world, each carrying invisible “spirits” of chemicals and stories. The installation functions as a Haunted Waters Bar, where water samples collected by activists, scientists, and citizens are paired with narratives that reveal histories of pollution, industrial decisions, and ecological struggles. Through interactive workshops, visualisations, and storytelling, the project encourages participants to engage with the chemical, social, and spiritual dimensions of water, highlighting its entanglement with human and nonhuman worlds alike.

About the artists

Nonhuman Nonsense is a research-driven art and design collective working in the realm of social dreaming and world-making. Their projects engage with the nonhuman — animals, objects, ecology, technology, and the spectres between and beyond categories. Embracing “nonsense” as an antidote to common sense, the collective creates paradoxical scenarios that explore ethical and metaphysical layers of our relationship with the world. Projects take many forms, including interactive installations, workshops, short films, public sculptures, campaigns, chatbots, and books. The core team consists of Leo Fidjeland, Linnea Våglund, and Filips Staņislavskis, based in Riga, Malmö, and Dharamshala, often collaborating with scientists, researchers, and friends.