Experience/exhibition - Maria the Sturgeon’s Dream

In the fall of 2020, the Estonian Museum of Natural History opened an immersive experience Maria the Sturgeon’s Dream. It tells the story of the Baltic Sea’s history, nowadays and future through an audio-visual experience. The exhibition was created in collaboration with dramatist Urmas Lennuk and featured the voices of Ülle Kaljuste and Argo Aadli.

When the visitors walk into the room, they step into an underwater underworld. As one of the two main characters, Maria the Sturgeon’s mulage is on display. Alongside it, many awarded and masterfully created fish mulages that introduce the species living in the Baltic Sea help to tell the story.

Exhibition curator Lennart Lennuk about the exhibition:

Together they create an image about the Baltic Sea that goes across generations and includes topics from the health of the sea to its inhabitants, including subjects as pollution redaction, benefits sea gives us, excess nutrients, alien species, micro-plastics and drug residues, but also the cultural value of the sea”.

Animations
BOP Animation

Sound composition
Sten-Olle Moldau.

Why we did?
In 20202 we had a small problem in the Estonian Museum of Natural History. We had a small exhibition room about animal senses, but it looked very tired. So it was decided to tear it down and replace it with an exhibition about the Baltic Sea.

Same time we had some problems/limitations/options

• The budget was very limited, so we needed to be clever.
  
• We had a ton of good leftover projectors.
• We had a small and very weird-shaped room.
• We had an awesome Atlantic Sturgeon replica that was caught by fishermen in the 90s.

So if we put all the problems and options together then we came up with an idea to create 270 degree immersive cinema-like experience that combines physical mulages and visual storytelling.