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 water samples, 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.

Rebecca Carlson is Project Coordinator for the SAFIRE programme at the University of Oulu. She was previously Associate Professor in Media and Culture at Toyo University in Japan. Trained in cultural and visual anthropology, her research examines the production of subjectivity, knowledge, and power in the transnational circulation of science and technology.

Maximilian Schrade is a molecular ecologist from the University of Oulu working in ecosystem characterisation and monitoring of aquatic systems in (sub-) polar regions. His work includes a strong citizen science focus aiming to include and give agency to local communities into the monitoring, conservation and restoration of their respective home river systems.