A growing collection of contaminated waters from around the world, submitted by activists, scientists, swimmers, citizens, and friends. Each water is haunted by a multitude of ‘spirits’ telling stories that speak of the past, of decisions made by those in power, of struggles, accidents, wars, greed, and action.
Pollution, contamination, forever chemicals… What have we done?! OMG! I need a glass...
Welcome to the Haunted Waters Bar—a growing collection of contaminated waters. Here, you’ll find a menu featuring a variety of water samples from around the world, submitted by activists, scientists, swimmers, citizens, and friends. Some samples come from lakes, rivers, and the sea, while others are filled from the tap. While they may all look similar, each water is haunted by a multitude of ‘spirits’ telling different stories—stories that speak of the past, of decisions made by those in power, of struggles, accidents, wars, greed, and action.
Chemicals in water are not unlike ghosts – they haunt and alter beings and places, are often invisible to the naked eye, relate to historic injustice, and are trapped in places they were not meant to be. The complexity of chemical cocktails hinders research on their negative impact on health and environment. The destruction of ecosystems and disruption of communities conjures these eerie beings into existence; the spirits have awakened!
Scientists at the JRC Water Quality Lab are on a mission to analyse the “haunted” waters through mass spectrometry & chromatography and identify specific substances and their concentrations. While the Lab focuses on analysis, the Bar offers a space for symbolism, synthesis and stories. Here, many different spirits are brought together to echo hydro-social relations taking place over space and time. Relations that are symptomatic of the post-natural era we live in. Like any bar, it’s also a space for sharing stories, socialising, and, of course, drinking. Some waters (think: spirits & chemical cocktails) are safe to consume, with concentrations of chemical substances within governmental safety limits. However, others are so contaminated that they pose serious health hazards and are forbidden to order. These waters remain trapped on the shelf for years to come.
The contaminating substances in themselves are neither only good nor only bad. Pharmaceuticals can be life-saving, PFAS might offer unique technical possibilities and pesticides allow us to sustain our (industrialised) agricultural practices. These chemicals were never intended to end up in our water, yet a lot of them do and will continue doing that. The moment they enter the aquatic environment is when they turn into ‘contaminants’ and ‘spirits’.
They haunt our planetary waters - seas, lakes, rivers, groundwater, and even our own bodies, as evidenced by the presence of PFAS in top EU officials’ blood (European Environmental Bureau, 2024).[i] The pollutants defy borders, hitchhiking the hydrological cycle that connects all living beings.
These spirits have diverse origins: agriculture, industrial production, pharmaceutical industry, consumer products, mining, oil spills, and war. Their pervasive presence is a major global environmental problem because it can lead to the degradation of aquatic ecosystems, posing serious health risks to both humans and nonhumans and increasing the likelihood of diseases, including cancer, infertility and neurological impacts (Bondy & Campbell, 2018, p. 4). They are chemicals and poisons; the product of neglect, of industrialised capitalism, but they are also messengers and a feral force.
Literary theorist Sladja Blazan (2021) notes that the sighting of a ghost exposes the entanglements of horror and history, and “the way the past makes cultural demands on us we have difficulty fulfilling.”
They are here, and not leaving any time soon. They have come to demand attention and action.
How do we live with haunted waters?
Concept
What happens when technologies and their unintended consequences become so ubiquitous that it is difficult to define what is ‘natural’ or not?
— Nicolas Nova & Disnovation.org (2022)
Life in our times entails an apparent dissolution of the strict separation of things; the natural is tied to the unnatural, the human to the nonhuman. As ecological processes become increasingly shaped by human activity and its deposits, the ‘natural’ emerges as an inaccurate concept to describe the world around us.[ii] At the same time, an uncanny eeriness emerges; sunbathing reminds us of global warming, breathing city air of pollution, drinking water of contamination.
Clean water is fundamental for life on Earth. Yet every year, the chemical, physical and biological contamination of our waters continues. These unseen anthropogenic substances are haunting our experience by altering and estranging homes and bodies, creating an eerie unfamiliarity. The classical image of the unseen, uncanny haunter are the ghosts, spirits, and spectres.
Horror is becoming the environmental norm.
— Sara L. Crosby (2014, p. 514)
To explore water quality, its material, cultural, political and spiritual occurrence links to an interpretation of water beyond the hydrologic cycle, in which water flows are merely objects of study and technical manipulation. For Linton et al. (2022) the approach we have towards water should rather be guided by the hydrosocial cycle “a socio- natural process by which water and society make and remake each other over space and time”. By making and remaking each other water and society are hybrids, in which the relationship is constituting rather than connecting.
The contaminants emerge within this interplay as boundary teasing feral entities, hitchhiking the hydrosocial cycle and remaking it from within. The chemicals were made by humans, for humans, yet the moment they enter the water, ownership and control over them is lost. They turn into spirits, not passive but with an agency of their own, often at cross purposes with human ones. They turn into an obscurity between categories - less an object than an event, less a term than a relation, less an individual than a multitude.
It is easy to demonise such spirits, especially if they cause health issues that might lead to suffering and death. And yet, they carry important lessons born of our time of looming socio-ecological catastrophes.
The writer Avery F. Gordon (2008) examines how ghosts and haunting can be understood as expressions of unresolved social tensions, traumas, and injustices. “But haunting, unlike trauma, is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done”(p.XVI). Drawing on the concept of haunting from Gordon, seeing the contaminants as spirits becomes a way to prompt us to look beyond chemistry and turn to history - what underlying traumas and hardships might be carried by these entities? What cycles of harm and injustice are being perpetuated by these spirits? What are their demands?
Water contamination is not just a technical or scientific issue but a manifestation of broader social and economic inequalities embedded within our systems. The haunting presence of pollutants is a legacy of industrialisation, colonisation, and exploitation that continue to shape our contemporary world.
There are numerous examples: the tourism industry and large-scale agriculture around the Mar Menor Lagoon in Spain led to an ecosystem collapse in 2016, when several species were pushed to the brink of extinction. In 2014, governmental officials of Flint, Michigan, decided to change the water supply from Detroit water to the Flint River to save money during a financial crisis. The dangerous levels of lead in the river though rather led to a public health crisis, killing at least 12 people. In the Central Andes of Peru, the mercury used in the illegal gold mining has serious effects on plant and animal life, causing oxidative stress in fish and retard growth in plants.
Capitalism runs and thrives on the production of such spirits, its profit-driven motives often take precedence over environmental and human health concerns. These spectral contaminants are revealing unresolved and ongoing societal and ecological violence, which is also disproportionately affecting marginalised communities. From this perspective, addressing water contamination requires more than just technical solutions or regulatory measures; it necessitates a fundamental transformation of our socio-economic systems.
The haunted water flows not just through rivers and oceans, but through the very veins of our interconnected world, permeating and connecting all bodies of water, linking human and non-human bodies in a web of relationality. We take a sip; it flows through us and onwards into the world - things that before felt distant and remote suddenly are close and intimate. By acknowledging how water binds us to the world and each other, we can begin to cultivate a deeper sense of responsibility and reverence for the Earth and all its inhabitants. This kind of awareness emerges when we meet the spirits. They carry a lesson of interdependence that could potentially catalyse a shift in our relationship with the waters. Through this lesson, the terrifying entities reveal their benevolent nature and their power to inspire awe.
The ‘myth-of-the-end-of-myth’ managed to become the foundational myth of modernity.
— Dorin Budușan (2023, p. 49)
Numerous critiques of modernity identify the rise of science, secularisation, industrialisation, and capitalism as factors responsible for the disenchantment of the world, since these are processes that prioritise rationality, efficiency, and material gain over spiritual or mystical experiences. Yet have modern Western societies really been disenchanted by the rise of science and rationalism? These spirits, born out of modernity, are ‘un-puring’ nature/culture, while at the same time re-enchanting the world in an obscure and horrific way.
Might the break-down of the human-nonhuman divide, which destabilises the distinction
between humans and nature and the distinction between humans and technology, not also
destabilise the distinction between the material and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural,
the sceptical and the superstitious?
— Nils Bubandt (2018, p. 7-8)
Could modern spirits challenge the ‘profit-driven, disenchanting & dividing’ way of thinking that gave rise to them? Could they help us (re)spiritualise science, and connect to a deeper, interconnected worldview? The world is vibrant, teeming with countless forces, each shaping and echoing the other in mysterious ways. It is full of spirits!
Context
Through “The gems of water” project at the JRC, the scientific project officer Caterina Cacciatori and her colleagues are sending out water monitoring tools to local citizens around the world to monitor and collect information on chemical contamination present in water.
The starting point of our art-science collaboration with Caterina was to compare these water monitoring tools to ghost hunting tools, and the local citizens & scientists to ghost hunters. By drawing parallels between pollutants trapped in bodies of water to ghosts/spirits, we invited the hunters to reflect on what it means to live on a haunted planet. The analogy proved to be a good opening also in conversation with other scientists and policymakers during our residency at the JRC.
Throughout the last year we were learning about chemical contamination and “The Gems of Water”. Caterina and her colleague Giulio Mariani invited us on a few occasions into the Lab, introducing us to their work and demonstrating how they use incredibly precise and weird looking liquid/gas chromatography machines and mass spectrometry tools to find out the chemical composition of water samples. We also met up virtually with the first “The gems of water” pilot partners activists from Coral Conservation in Costa Rica, who are investigating the rivers Sixaola, Estella and Carbón for content and concentrations of pesticides from surrounding banana monocultures. The activists were worried that the pesticide run-off would eventually threaten corals in the ocean and were frustrated with the banana Industry, which has been infamous for its labour conditions, violent history and chemical use. The industry has a considerable environmental impact and the used pesticides used cause health issues including sterility and cancer to the ones exposed.
The samples collected by the activists will eventually be analysed at the JRC for around 250 compounds. Yet they contain much more than that. These samples carry with them also emotions, traumas, fear and anger which can’t be analysed scientifically. We got interested in sharing the stories behind the pollution, telling of their origin, effects, as well as, how people are coping with them.
Therefore, together with Caterina, we came up with the idea of creating a “ghost hunting probe kit” to gather stories about contaminated bodies of water from people involved in “The Gems of Water” project. We constructed a prototype and brought it to Ispra, where feedback from Mateusz Tokarski, who coordinates projects on citizen engagement, from Adriaan Eeckels, head of JRC’s SciArt project, and Caterina gave us insights on how to revise the toolkit. Then on, the toolkit idea transformed and took two tracks - a web submission & workshop.
Water and story collection
Inspired by the engagement of citizens and willing to make story sharing more accessible, we created a web submission form through which anyone could (and still can!) share their ‘ghost story’ and is invited to send a water sample to us. The bottles of water and the stories form the content of the Haunted Waters Bar.
Haunted Waters, the workshop
In 2023, we were invited by curator Johanna Janßen to hold a workshop at Galerie Im Turm in Berlin, for the exhibition “Pole der Unzugänglichkeit” – conceptions of (extra)terrestrial worlds between reality and fiction”. We took the opportunity to develop methods of personifying (or “ghostifying”) the spectral contaminants, which was an idea originally conceived during our residency and meant to be done via the tool kit. It turned into a ‘Haunted Waters Workshop’ for exploring different contaminants through creative writing and drawing.
In the workshop, participants were equipped with printed articles and paper excerpts detailing various chemicals found (in very low concentrations) in Berlin’s tap water, including PFAS, lead, nitrates, microplastics and pharmaceutical residues. Following this informational session and a sip of water from the tap, we underwent a hypnotic visualisation exercise. We ventured into the network of our blood vessels to encounter the spirits associated with these chemicals. We followed these ethereal entities through time, exploring both the recent past and a distant future. The hypnotic session prompted participants to imagine details of each spirit, contemplating their origins, desires, fears, and envisioning their appearances. The participants then drew the contaminants, shared their stories and reflected on what they can teach us about our own existence.
The workshop closed with a discussion, during which the curious observation was made that a few of the stories of contaminants were actually inner self-portraits. The participants were projecting their own feelings; fears, confusions and hopes of living on a damaged planet into the spirits, giving the exercise an introspective twist.
The event marked an inspirational turn for us, we felt drawn to the act of letting the spirits flow through our bodies and be met as mirrors of our anxieties, leading up to the idea of creating a Haunted Waters Bar. The drawings made during the workshop were later on used as a reference to create animated spirit portraits for the bar.
Scientific Background
The Gems of Water:
The scientific background of the artwork is based on “The Gems of Water” activity carried out in the framework of the Blue Health project (Cacciatori et al., 2023). “The Gems of Water” supports the engagement work of the UN-World Water Quality Alliance. The activity involves citizens through a co-creative approach in the definition of a local water quality concern, design of a monitoring strategy and sample collection and extraction. Samples collected and extracted by citizen groups are processed at the JRC Water Quality Lab facility and data are shared with participants. The water quality monitoring kits use a technology (the Stir Bar Sorptive Extraction) which allows for wide-screening of around 250 compounds, which include pesticides, pharmaceuticals and industrial compounds. The method provides quantitative and qualitative information about the chemicals in bodies of water around the world, which can be used to further investigate water quality. The activity has been successfully piloted in Costa Rica, while the exercise is on-going in Kenya and Romania.
New chemicals, cocktails and the need for stronger regulations:
The environmental impact of chemicals is a rapidly growing concern, with approximately 10 million new compounds produced yearly (1,000 p/h) (Daley, 2017). Unfortunately, research on their impacts on human and ecosystem health lags due to underfunding, leading to the approval of chemicals for commercial use, with unknown environmental consequences.
The “cocktail effect” occurs when seemingly harmless concentrations of single substances combine, posing health risks. A European Environment Agency report ‘Chemicals in European waters’ (EEA, 2018, p. 56) notes that the detection of several hundred chemicals at low concentrations in a single freshwater sample is common and the level of risk that that might present is insufficiently understood. Current safety assessments focus on individual substances, leaving a significant protection gap in regulations.
As global chemical production grows (Persson et al., 2022, p. 1512) and the number of chemicals in use around the world multiplies (Wang et al., 2020, p. 2575), urgent action is needed to implement robust chemical regulations to safeguard us and the wider environment. The challenge extends to addressing the biodiversity crisis (Schneider, 2020), emphasising the critical role of more “ghost hunters”—those monitoring, modelling, and reporting—to render the world of contaminants visible. Only then can policies and regulations be appropriately targeted, ensuring a healthier and safer future for all the living.
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Bondy, Stephen C. & Campbell, Arezoo (2018). Water Quality and Brain Function. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15(1) doi:10.3390/ijerph15010002
Blazan, Sladja (ed.) (2021). Haunted Nature: Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman. Palgrave MacMillan.
Nova, Nicolas & disnovation.org (2022). A Bestiary of the Anthropocene: Hybrid Plants, Animals, Minerals, Fungi, and Other Specimens. Set Margins.
Linton, Jamie & Budds, Jessica (2014). The hydrosocial cycle: Defining and mobilizing a relational-dialectical approach to water. Geoforum, volume 57, 170-180. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.10.008
Crosby, Sara L. (2014). Beyond Ecophilia: Edgar Allan Poe and the American Tradition of Ecohorror. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 21(3). doi:10.1093/isle/isu080
Gordon, Avery (2008). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press. New edition, Introduction to the New Edition, XV-XX.
Budușan, Dorin (2023). It Fell From The Stars: Alternative Cosmogonies from the Second World. Amsterdam.
Bubandt, Nils (ed.) (2018). A Non-secular Anthropocene: Spirits, Specters and Other Nonhumans in a Time of Environmental Change. More-than-Human. AURA Working Papers, Volume 3, 2-18.
Barad, Karen (2006). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9780822388128
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2007). The Crystal Forest : Notes on the Ontology of Amazonian Spirits. Inner Asia, 9(2), 153-172. doi:10.1163/146481707793646575
European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Cacciatori, C., Mariani, G., Carollo, A. (2023). The gems of water : how to become a gem of water? : an illustrated guide for citizen engagement under the UNEP GEMS/Water programme. Publications Office of the European Union. doi:10.2760/334925
Daley, Jason (2017, February 3). Science Is Falling Wouefully Behind in Testing New Chemicals. Smithsonian Magazine. (accessed: 2024, May 28) ▻https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/science-falling-woefully-behind-testing-new-chemicals-180962027
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Persson, L.; Carney Almroth, B. M.; Collins, C. D.; Cornell, S.; de Wit, C. A.; Diamond, M. L.; Fantke, P.; Hassellöv, M.; MacLeod, M.; Ryberg, M. W.; Søgaard J. P.; Villarrubia-Gómez, P.; Wang, Z.; Hauschild, M. Z. (2022). Outside the Safe Operating Space of the Planetary Boundary for Novel Entities. Environmental Science & Technology, 56(3), 1510-1521. doi:10.1021/acs.est.1c04158
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[i] The European Environmental Bureau and ChemSec have identified toxic substances in the blood of top Brussels politicians — part of a campaign to push for an EU-wide ban on the chemicals despite heavy industry pushback.
[ii] As Timothy Morton, N. Katherine Hayles and many with them have argued. Cf. Morton, Timothy (2007). Ecology without Nature: rethinking environmental aesthetics. Harvard University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv1n3x1c9; Hayles, N. Katherine (2023, July 10). The End of Being Human: Evolution in the age of Machines. IAI News. (accessed: 2024, May 28) ▻https://iai.tv/articles/the-end-of-being-human-auid-2536
