The Sea is full of kind creatures. The Sea is full of trash!

This exhibition is a world. This world is the ocean. There, fish and trash coexist. For this exhibition, children thought about the ocean and their favorite characters from Nordic children’s books. Now, they invite us to a place to dream about a different nature. We all should take this invitation seriously. It asks us to observe, to remember the stories we read, but also to continue to draw—as the children did for this exhibition—and to tell stories.

The sea is full of kind creatures. The sea is full of trash! is curated by 13 children from Iceland, Denmark, Finland, and Estonia who took part in the Young Curators initiative. Under guidance from curator Chus Martinez and local facilitators, the children have selected works from the collections of the partner museums and added their own drawings and texts to the exhibition. The works connect tales from Nordic children’s literature to the 14th Sustainable Development Goal of the UN: Life Below Water. 

The exhibition is on view at Gerðarsafn - Kópavogur Art Museum and online here.

About The Water Drop
Can classic children’s literature inspire a new way of thinking about contemporary social challenges like environmentalism, gender equality and diversity?

That’s the question that created The Water Drop—a partnership project between four Nordic cultural institutions that connects classic children’s literature and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. By combining arts, science and the environment into an interactive program, The Water Drop wants to empower children to engage with and act on the big questions of our time. At the heart of this is the Young Curators initiative, which invites school children from Iceland, Denmark, Finland and Estonia to co-curate our public program over the next three years. 

The Water Drop was conceived by The Cultural Houses of Kópavogur, Iceland, the Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Denmark, the Moomin Museum in Finland and Ilon’s Wonderland in Estonia. Idea and project developed in collaboration with PAVILION NORDICO. The project will be realized over the next years with an international array of collaborators including institutions, museums, libraries, schools and independent cultural practitioners. 

The Water Drop is generously supported by Erasmus+, The Nordic Culture Fund, Nordplus, The Icelandic Children’s Culture Fund and Kópavogur Art & Culture Fund.