Watershed (Final Call)

(2025)

The Danube Delta serves as a natural final filter, where river meets sea in a complex process of purification and transformation. While decades of environmental regulation have reduced petrochemical pollution, microplastics now overwhelm the system with particles. New forms of contamination continue to emerge. What happens when the Delta reaches its limits?

Watershed (Final Call) traces water's journey through this critical threshold. It is the second in the Watershed series.
Transparent plates channel water drops before they hit specially treated fabric below, each drop carrying industrial runoff, agricultural chemicals, and urban waste that the delta processes daily. When water meets the textile surface, colors shift and bloom in real-time transformation. The visual metamorphoses reflect the same chemical disruptions the delta works to neutralize.

The delta's acoustic landscape reveals another layer of disruption. Underwater recordings demonstrate how sound travels for kilometers through interconnected channels. Electric boat motors vibrate through the water column, masking the quieter communications of fish and the subtle sounds of insect larvae on reed stems. What we've lost above the surface becomes audible here.

Projections magnify the delta's microscopic residents: specialized plankton that exist only in this precise mixing zone of salt- and freshwater. As living indicators, their presence or absence signals whether the delta's fundamental conversation between river and sea is still functioning.
Each water drop completes its journey here, carrying stories from upstream and leaving them in the sediment. The delta remembers what the watershed has forgotten.