Rikke Luther Begins to Follow “Mud”
“Mud is the Earth itself right now,” says Rikke Luther. Landscapes that once seemed stable are now collapsing beneath advancing mud. Starting from South America, she has travelled through Japan and Greenland, observing environmental change together with scientists and reconstructing what she finds into narratives. This process is neither mere documentation nor accusation—it is a quiet, persistent question directed toward the future. We spoke with her about how an artist can confront the Earth’s transformation.
I first met Rikke in 2004, when she was in residence at ARCUS in Ibaraki Prefecture. She created a cardboard dome there, which after completion was moved to the AIT Room in Daikanyama and used for several months as a site for meetings and events.
At that time, Rikke had just left the Copenhagen-based art collective N55, which is known for its philosophy that sharing, rather than owning, makes society better. N55 published manuals—designs and instructions for their works so that anyone could freely copy and reproduce them. Since its founding in 1996, I have followed N55’s manuals with great interest.
Rikke’s new platform, Learning Site, launched after she left N55, inherited this open, collaborative ethos. It brought together not only artists but also sociologists, urban planners, lawyers, and others to explore social issues through art.
When I co-curated the First Singapore Biennale in 2006, I invited Rikke to create a project there: a “mobile mushroom farm” installed in the common spaces of public housing.
Over the past decade, however, her focus has increasingly shifted toward Earth systems, environmental destruction, and the climate crisis. As she discusses below, she now spends extensive time with leading climate and Earth scientists as a postdoctoral researcher, transforming their findings into films and artworks.
In this conversation, we discuss what “mud” means as a metaphor for our unstable age, how artists can learn from scientists, and how storytelling can engage planetary crises.
Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Earth Systems
Roger McDonald (RM): Over the past decade, your work has strongly focused on human-driven environmental destruction, climate crisis, and Earth systems. What are you particularly focused on now?
Rikke Luther (RL): I have long worked with themes such as landscapes, urban planning, land ownership, and access to water. These gradually led me to what I now call “landscape transformation”—seeing land not as property but as a shifting terrain.
The turning point was in 2015, when I visited southern São Paulo, Brazil, during the country’s largest environmental disaster. Toxic mud from a collapsed mining wastewater dam flowed down rivers into the sea. Seeing that changed my thinking. I’ve been working on global commons, especially the high seas, and that’s when I started following mud.
RM: That dam collapse was truly a human-made disaster.
RL: Yes. When I tried to enter the restricted area, I realized just how absurd things were in Brazil. Even though I had permission, it was later revoked. A lawyer had to intervene so I could enter. And then, in 2019, another similar disaster happened. That same year I was filming in Japan, when a powerful typhoon hit. Tokyo went dark, and all you could see on TV were people shoveling mud. We were supposed to go to Gunkanjima to film mud, but the landing area had been destroyed, so everything had to change.
When landscapes are sealed with concrete, mud and water have nowhere to go.
Becoming Part of Climate Science
RM: After focusing on mud, how did your work develop?
RL: I became obsessed with how mud flows into the ocean. During COVID I went to Greenland, but our departure was delayed, winter came, and the mud froze. We were stuck in ice. While waiting for the military to break it, I spoke with an engineer and a sheepfarmer. They told me about new sediments, new organisms, and new diseases. That’s when I started thinking seriously about sediment, MUD.
RM: That sounds highly technical.
RL: Yes. So I contacted Katherine Richardson, a leading biological oceanographer and Earth system scientist, an architect of the Planetary Boundaries framework, has expanded our understanding of Earth System science, prompting further inquiries from the lead author of the Planetary Boundaries framework. I asked her what was happening with mud. She was applying for a major grant with geologists, and I asked if my artistic research could be included. She liked the idea, and I became part of her institute Research Centre on Ocean, Climate, and Society (www.rocs.ku.dk) at Copenhagen University and the University of Iceland as a postdoc.
RM: So you are an artist inside a scientific research institute.
RL: Exactly. There are also archaeologists, writers, and even humanure researchers. My work involves being inside this environment, talking to scientists, reading data, and re-interpreting it through my own narrative lens. That’s why I’m glad I did a PhD—it gave me the tools to handle complex thinking.
RM: How do you turn this research into artworks?
RL: I met Karina Krarup Sand, who works with environmental DNA (eDNA)—extracting ancient DNA from sediment. Through sediment, scientists can reconstruct deep ecological time. Mud came back again.
She gave me four scientific papers. They were very difficult, but I read them. Out of maybe ten pages, I might find two lines I can use in a script. That’s my method: enter the field, understand what I can, and recompose it into my own language.
RM: Are you a kind of science communicator?
RL: No. I don’t have that training. I mix different colors—Katherine’s work and Karina’s work—and from that an orange emerges. That’s my non-fiction storytelling.
As a mother, I need to understand what is happening and how to talk about it to my child. Climate crisis, war—these are part of our lives. I try to understand their components and build stories from them.
RM: How do these stories become films?
RL: I film, select images, write a rough script, and then my partner Jamie Stapleton refines the text. I translate scientific material into another language—one that won’t appear in Nature, but might appear in Bijutsu Techo.
A World Covered in Mud
RM: How seriously do climate scientists see the situation?
RL: They are very worried. Especially about biodiversity loss—because it is irreversible.
Recently I heard a lecture on AMOC, the Atlantic circulation system. It is weakening and may collapse, if it has not already collapsed. When a tipping point is reached, no one knows what happens. Maybe humans won’t survive—but rats and giant insects might.
Scientists study the past to understand new forms of life. They say we are only at the beginning of understanding.
Mud is the perfect metaphor for this transition. When I began in 2015, I never imagined landslides and mudflows would soon hit Iceland, Greenland, Norway, Germany, Belgium on a daily basis…
We must rethink our politics, our landscapes, our concrete worlds.
The Value of Primary Information
RM: Have you changed your production methods to be less extractive?
RL: Yes. In the 1990s I flew constantly. Then in Learning Site we were thinking of artworks not as archives, but as compost. At Learning Site we use recycling-based production.
RM: There was also something about the atmosphere of that time. The art world of the 1990s was, in a way, very free and open.
RL: Yes. But I think the way we construct narratives has changed since then. For example, in our project Learning Site, we began working on initiatives premised on recycling. We’ve redefined artworks not as things that should be preserved in archives, but as things that can be composted.
RM: Your mushroom project in Singapore was also centered around this idea of circular thinking. Everything was open-source, and accessible like a manual. It would be great if such approaches—how to create, exhibit, and share works—spread among more artists.
RL: I hope so. Of course, not every artist will go in that direction. But I do think awareness is growing. Everyone is engaging in their own way. Some people are even more thorough in their practices than I am.
RM: Finally, could you share the kinds of media and sources you access regularly? How do you stay up to date with the latest in climate science? Do you get information directly from researchers, or are there specific sites or news sources you rely on?
RL: I read newspapers, but above all, the best way is to “go to university and listen to lectures.”
RM: That’s a form of primary information.
RL: Exactly. For instance, when I tried to understand the current state of the AMOC, the climate section of the newspaper didn’t quite resonate. Something felt off. But when I actually attended a lecture by a mathematical statistician, I thought, “This is it!” Just transcribing what she said during the lecture made for a perfect script. It was so direct and easy to understand. It's much clearer to engage with primary sources than to go through several layers of mediation. I think that’s one of the privileges of being affiliated with a research institution. I don’t always fully understand everything, but even so, I’m able to receive something from it—and that becomes part of the work.
RL: Thank you. It was a wonderful conversation.
