Sun Oct 05 2025

Report from an artistic/ activist/ scientific journey through the Limfjord. 

About a month ago, we stayed for ten days in a village called Flade, on the island Mørs in Denmark. ‘We’ are a group of artists, activists, marine biologists, an oceanographer, a geographer and everything in between. Our common purpose here is to investigate the situation of the local body of water: the Limfjord. 

Geologically speaking, the Limfjord is not an actual fjord. True fjords are created when a glacier cuts a U-shaped valley through the landscape. The Limfjord doesn’t fit this description, and is rather defined as a water system, or a shallow part of the sea. But throughout history, the Limfjord has been called a fjord, because the etymological origin of the word ‘fjord’ describes it as an inlet of the sea, or a passageway. 

This particular passageway has a rich history, but it all starts with the story of its true origin. A long, very long time ago, a woman gave birth to a pig. This pig, called Limgrim, grew so big that one could see his long bristles over the treetops. As a pig would do, Limgrim loved to root in the ground with its snout, digging channels through the landscape. But one day, he reached the sea and the water broke through, gushing through the channels he had dug. Ever since that day, the Limfjord has been an important passageway for currents, sea creatures and humans. 

This is only one of the many versions of this story, but in every variation the main character is certainly always a pig. 

Did you know that in Denmark, there are more pigs than humans? 

Agriculture has an enormous impact on the ecosystem of Limfjord, even though one is above ground, and the other is under water. To grow crops efficiently for all those pigs, farmers use fertilizer. And since there are so many pigs, there is so much farmland that is continuously fertilized with nitrogen and phosphorus, which then washes into the Limfjord when it rains. Unfortunately, there are too many nutrients in the Limfjord, which contradictorily result to less biodiversity in the water. Just like on land, the nutrients in the water fertilize it. This over-fertilization is called eutrophication. The algae growing in surface waters are initially benefitting from this, especially certain species of brown algae and blue-green algae – cyanobacteria. Their rapid growth prevents sunlight from reaching deeper parts of the water, making it impossible for algae and seagrass on the bottom to do photosynthesis. When the overgrowth of surface algae dies, it sinks to the bottom where it decomposes. In this process most of the oxygen underwater is consumed, making parts of the Limfjord uninhabitable. The areas that do have oxygen are still severely underpopulated due to lack of sunlight, having fewer plants to provide shelter and food for fish and other species. And yes, this is only a very brief description of a complex, large-scaled problem. 

How to advocate for a body of water

Imagine you are water. No, imagine you are a fish in the water. Or maybe rather, imagine you are a strand of eelgrass rooted in the seabed of the Limfjord.

It is hard to empathize with beings considered non-human, especially when they aren’t above sea-level. The whole point of our stay in Flade was to figure out how we can do something for the Limfjord together through interdisciplinary collaboration. Working together wasn’t easy because our fields of expertise are far away from each other. So, a big lesson here was how to find each other, as artists and scientists. We did many exercises together, in which we thought about how to communicate scientific findings, how to position ourselves in activism, but also how to do storytelling, creating myths. Because even though this is a serious environmental issue, imagination and creativity are an important step to make people care. And when people care, they might change how they want the story of Limgrim to end. 

Together, we sketched out many small solutions for the Limfjord. Our next step is to act on them. 

The Wave Makers project was a Youth Exchange facilitated by Elvira Crois, Dominika Wojcieszek, Marieke Breyne, Bob Lundgreen, and Zunaira Malik and was funded by Erasmus+. If you want to initiate an engaged project yourself, you can apply for the same or similar funding from Erasmus+. Not sure of organizing something yourself, but eager to take action? There are many volunteering projects on the website of the European Solidarity Corps.

Helpful websites:

http://erasmusplusjeugd.be/

http://jint.be/

https://www.europeansolidaritycorps.be/wat/vrijwilligerswerk-jongeren/

Major thanks to Dominika Wojcieszek for co-writing the explanation of eutrophication.

Machteld Mercelis