De Kraak is a cross-border multilingual multimedia installation designed in the language of the sea. Visitors enter a transitional area where old stories from the Wadden Sea area are set in a contemporary context of overfishing, rising water levels and the consequences of endless economic growth. It is a playful visual performance about the past, present and future of our relationship with the sea, told as a love story.

The Wadden Sea is the largest unbroken system of intertidal sand and mud flats in the world. Over the centuries people have not only fought against but also cooperated with the water. It is this cooperation that offers hope for the future.

Read Dutch version

Mythical Stories

The protagonist of the installation is the Kraken, a mythical giant octopus that drags ships down with its tentacles. The Kraken guides visitors on their journey and is always present in the background in one way or another, loving or menacing.

Cross-border origins and cooperation

The exhibition space resembles an underwater world, where shell like structures function as viewing theatres for the stories. Through the enclosed design of the module and monitor hood the visitor is drawn into animations that are made by motion capture (digital animation), 3D or made with or on paper. Artists from all over the Wadden Sea area have worked on them, each story is a cooperation between a stop-motion artist and a composer. This presents to the visitors a lively, varied and creative experience.

On their journey, visitors also encounter two different kinds of objects: a 360˚ Virtual Reality experience and a periscope. They present the unique character of the Wadden Sea in an imaginative way: its origins, its dynamics, its inhabitants and the way in which we are connected to it.

Immersive experience

The installation is submerged in a moving water projection that takes the visitor into an underwater atmosphere. A soundscape fills the space through a series of ‘audio eyes’ that are scattered around. They are a cross between gentle waving sea grass and the ‘lantern’ of an angler fish. They overlook the space and keep an eye on the visitors. Their pupils are circular speakers through which the mesmerising and continously changing soundscape fills the space.

Sustainability

The stools the visitors sit on have a special relationship with the Wadden Sea as the seats contain shells from the area. They reinforce the sustainable aspect of this exhibition which is almost completely made of wood. Besides that, a lot of previous (wooden) material has been re-used in parts of the installation.

Spherical and translucent

Not only the stools are round, almost every part of the design of the installation is spherical. The physical appearance of the eight modules and the monitor head has been reduced to the essence of folding, unfolding and enclosing. The monitor head itself appears to be the brain of the object, telling the stories of De Kraak. With the objects being translucent, the light travelling through connects all elements in the space.

Travelling exhibition

The arrangement of al the exhibition elements can be flexibly adapted to the space. This allows the plan to shrink and expand depending on its location.

De Kraak involves a number of educational projects, connecting schools to the subject. In the coming period the interactive exhibition will travel along the border of the northern coastal provinces of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark:
Summer 2022: Seal Centre Pieterburen
September-October 2022: With Art Schip De Eestroom on tour to Dokkum, Harlingen, Leeuwarden and Zwolle
October 2022-current: Ecomare op Texel
Later in 2023: Landesmuseum Natur und Mensch Oldenburg