Invisible Arrivals is a short film and Liquid Grounds is series of photographs and that focus on aquatic species living in urban waterways — small forms of life we rarely notice in everyday life. Using a zoomed-in lens, I capture these creatures at a microscale, where they take on a presence of their own, forming strange and vivid landscapes.
By shifting our point of view, the work challenges what we think of as visible or important. These often-overlooked species become central, while the urban surroundings fade into abstraction. At this scale, the usual sense of time and space begins to slip — the familiar feels unfamiliar, and the boundaries between us and the more-than-human world start to blur.
Invisible Arrivals
We live in a rootless age.
Goods, people, and species move constantly, detached from fixed origins. More than half of Europe’s non-native species arrive via the Port of Rotterdam, carried unintentionally with ships and cargo. These organisms are not failures of adaptation; they are companions in global fluxes.
Their presence challenges our desire for ecological purity and static boundaries. Policies often label them “non-native” based on historical cut-off dates—an arbitrary measure in a world where ecosystems are always shifting. Hidden Arrivals does not romanticize these species. Instead, it asks: who decides what belongs, and how can we respond with curiosity rather than control?
Invisible Arrivals reframes non-native species as travelers entangled in global flows, and hopes this perspective can open pathways for ecological kinship across geographic, political, and species boundaries.
