Art of the Dredge: Sediment, Depth and Desire in Maritime Infrastructure
Luleå port in winter 2026
Art of the Dredge: Sediment, Depth and Desire in Maritime Infrastructure explored the environmental, social and political dimensions of large-scale dredging through a participatory, multisensory art methodology in Luleå, Sweden. The project ran from September 2025 to February 2026 and addressed the Malmporten dredging project in the Bothnia Bay to make visible, sensible, and discussable the industrial process of dredging that is ecologically and socially impactful yet often goes unnoticed. Funding was received from a call on Ocean Literacy convened by the PartArt4OW consortium funded by the EU Horizon programme and the project also extends the Swedish Research Council project Terra Potentia: The World-making Force of Dredging (KTH, Tulane, Vanderbilt, IDOS, PI H Ernstson).
Preparatory underwater and over-water filming of active dredging was conducted in Södertälje near Stockholm in November 2025 since dredging in Luleå had been postponed (read about Malmporten project below). Video on how business and corporate companies present dredging was also gathered. Stakeholder engagement and participatory workshops with six civil society organisations representing thousands of members were carried out in Luleå in December 2025 and January 2026. The workshops combined audiovisual material, immersive sound, and collective mapping exercises to generate emotive cartographies and collaborative scripts and musical pieces, reflecting local perspectives and surfacing questions and insights.
The project culminated in participatory screenings and the development of a replicable methodology for collaborative film-making of marine infrastructure, inspired by the gradual build-up of sediment. Outcomes include a co-scripted film, gathering of a stakeholder network, and media outreach. The project expanded ocean literacy by connecting industrial infrastructure, biodiversity impacts, and lived coastal experience, offering a model for participatory engagement with marine infrastructure development applicable across European port regions.
One of the outputs was a co-scripted 14 minute co-scripted film, “Art of the Dredge,” first shown at PartArt4OW exhibition in the Badalona port near Barcelona, on 28 February 2026, with subsequent public screenings in Luleå and Stockholm in the spring. (Link to film will released here below open access by June 2026). Further information about the methodology and the Malmporten project follows below.
The team running the project would especially thank the art space Galleri Syster and Lilla Syster in Luleå for so gracefully providing a home-space away from home in Luleå. Thanks also to all who participated in interviews and workshops in Luleå and to dredge operators in Södertälje. The project consisted of: Benjamin Geredes, video artist at the Institute for Future Studies, Stockholm; Felicia Fahlin, project manager and PhD student at KTH Royal Institute of Technology’s Environmental History Department, Stockholm; and Henrik Ernstson, expert in political ecology focusing on dredging and Professor at the Environmental Science Department at KTH (aka SEED), Stockholm.
Art of the Dredge, a co-scripted film to make sensible the industrial force of dredging
Scholarly reference for video: Ernstson, Henrik, Felicia Fahlin, and Benjamin Gerdes* (2026). Art of the Dredge. (14 minutes, Art and research video). Commissioned by Participatory Art for Ocean and Water (PartArt4OW) premiered in Badelona, Barcelona, 19 Feb 2026. URL: https://vimeo.com/1176557292 (password protected for now; * alphabetical order).
Methodology and Project Process
Art of the Dredge aimed to (i) Reveal dredging as a “must-read” for ocean literacy; (ii) Empower Luleå residents to engage critically and creatively with maritime infrastructure; (iii) Develop and distribute a participatory art methodology for investigating dredging; and (iv) Contribute to public understanding of biodiversity impacts and sediment politics in the Bothnia Bay.
To reach these aims, the project explored dredging through a multi-sensory and multi-media form of ocean literacy. Rather than approaching dredging solely as a technical or infrastructural matter, the project treated it as a layered socio-ecological phenomenon that must be sensed, interpreted, and collectively articulated. The methodology followed an iterative and participatory artistic research process, balancing three elements: Information, contextual and scientific framing of dredging and Malmporten; Sensorial immersion, immersive sound and video, including underwater footage; Reflective collective creation, collaborative scripting and visual composition). This iterative logic unfolded across three phases:
1. Gathering: Making Dredging Sensible. Gathering audiovisual materials to make dredging perceptible beyond policy documents and industry renderings. Underwater footage was successfully secured, strengthening the sensory dimension of the project and foregrounding benthic ecologies—often absent from public debate. This material functioned as a catalyst for reflection rather than neutral documentation, juxtaposing industrial scale with sea-floor life and sediment histories.
2. Partnering: Stakeholder Dialogues and Iterative Refinement. Meetings with local stakeholders, civil society groups, fishermen, environmental organisations, cultural practitioners, and residents in Luleå. These dialogues informed both workshop design and early editing decisions. Stakeholder consultations led to two important refinements: A shift from individual geo-tagged mapping toward collective scripting with a stronger emphasis on collective meaning-making. Participants represented seven stakeholder and civil society groups, including: Luleå Sportfishing Society, Fishing Collective DB Fisk (artisanal fishers), The Luleå chapter of The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (SNF), XR Rebell Moms, Hej Främling/Hello Stranger, Svartöstaden Local History Association, Svartöstaden Interest Association.
3. Workshopping: Collective Script Formation and Sediment Logic. Participatory workshops and a screening session with participants representing different stakeholder and civil society groups. Workshops and screening sessions combined audiovisual immersion with collaborative scripting through visual-textual composition. The methodology was inspired by sedimentation itself: each voice layered onto the previous one, forming a gradual build-up of shared meaning. This collective scripting and editing mirrors the ecological accumulation of sediments — slow, relational, and stratified. A pre-screening with artist and scholar peers followed by discussion formed part of the iterative editing process, ensuring that the material was critically examined before public presentation.
Methodological Outcomes
The iterative balance between information, sensory immersion, and reflective creation produced outcomes that moved across multiple registers:
- Personal relationships to the sea and coastal identity
- Ecological concerns, including benthic habitats and toxic sediments
- Worries about livelihoods, fishing access, and industrial expansion
- Reflections on regional, national, and international politics
- Questions of democratic participation in infrastructural decision-making
Participants frequently expressed that they had previously limited awareness of dredging’s industrial magnitude and biodiversity impacts. The workshops expanded understanding not only of dredging as a technical process, but as a socio-ecological transformation. The project also successfully drew attention to benthic life and sea-floor ecologies — entities often excluded from public discourse.
On the the Malmporten dredge project — and its postponement, for now
The Malmporten dredge project, once claimed to be the largest in Swedish history, now probably surpassed by the Scandia port dredge project in Gothenburgh, has been planned since at least 2012. The plans to extensively deepen the port, which had grown more shallow because of relatively rapid sea-level rise due to Ice Age rebound in these regions, was triggered when the state-owned mining company LKAB asked for a deeper port so that the largest ships of the Baltic Sea, so called BalticMax, could enter: 240 meters long, 42 meters wide, and 15,4 meter deep going (draft). This would help to scale up their iron ore extraction in their Kiruna mine, which since long is connected to the port with a train line. A range of other industries have since seen benefits with deepening and expanding the port, including so called “green transition” companies like the Stegra “green steel” company currently being built in near-by Boden. The EU Commission is also supportive, viewing the expanded port as potential host for a desired European-based processing plant for the chemical refinement of Rare Earth Elements (REEs), planned to also be extracted by LKAB in Kiruna, which could veer off EU’s dependency on China. In the summer of 2023, a Dutch company carried out test dredging, followed by a full season of dredging by the Dutch companies Van Oord and Boskalis in the summer of 2024 when the acclaimed largest dredge ship in the world, Magnor operated. The Port of Luleå started preparing for the “deep port.” Four more seasons of large-scale dredging until 2028 was planned to extract and move some 20 million cubic metres of sediments, starting in 2025, but these plans got postponed in January 2025 when Luleå municipality, who owns the port, and the Swedish state thought costs for the project were to high. A redesign of a narrower shipping channel was developed in spring 2025 that sought to lessen the need for dredging, landing at requiring 14 million cubic metres of sediments to be dredged and moved. New negotiations have been ongoing and continued dredging is planned to start in April 2027, and continue until October each year for 3-4 summers, i.e., until 2030. (This update written by Henrik Ernstson in March 2026.)
Below follows photos from the project taken at Södertälje canal and in Luleå.
