Looking into the Underwater World: An Attempt to Make What Is Below the Surface Visible from Above

This chapter focuses on how trash scuba divers use various media and tactics to make what is below the surface visible to people on land. They do this by bringing waste up and creating installations from it, and by images and videos that are broadcast on social and traditional media to show how it looks below water and to move people into action. These installations take the shape of a waste copy of the well-known Christmas straw goat from the northern Swedish town of Gävle, or of the City Hall in Stockholm. Theoretically, the divers compile historical and current practices into what has been called a “moral punctuation” (Ahmann, It’s Exhausting to Create an Event Out of Nothing: Slow Violence and the Manipulation of Time. Cultural Anthropology 33(1): 142–171, 2018)—meaning that past and ongoing actions are put together in an argument for immediate action to change the situation. One example of such an initiative is an underwater demonstration staged by the divers where they demonstrate against the city of Stockholm dumping dirty snow into the drinking water. The chapter concludes with the importance of visualizing what has long been made invisible in order to force a change in relations between people, waste, and water.