RAN – an immersive installation about the dark side of 1760s Bohuslän

Emma Stüffe, Aviwe Apleni, Anna Maria Joakimsdottir-Hutri, Jesper Cederholm & Ylva Olsson / Sweden & Finland

In a haunted coastal village of 1760s Sweden, a woman accused of witchcraft must be saved—or condemned—by the audience themselves in an immersive AI-driven reckoning with history, silence, and civil courage.

RAN is an immersive, interactive visual narrative installation set on the Swedish West Coast in the 1760s, a time of piracy, superstition, and the rise of the Herring Barons. At its center is Anna, a Finnish immigrant woman whose husband has vanished under mysterious circumstances. Alone with her children, she struggles to survive in a coastal community gripped by fear and patriarchal control.

Anna is a healer, using herbs, rituals, and knowledge passed down through generations but her difference makes her dangerous in the eyes of the village. Accused of witchcraft, she becomes a scapegoat for deeper social tensions and hidden crimes. As her fate draws near, the audience is placed in a morally charged position: Will they intervene or stay silent?

The installation unfolds in a 360° space where sound, light, and visuals respond to audience behavior. Sensors track movement behaviour of the audience, triggering shifts in environment and narrative. Historical landscapes breathe and shift, and characters appear or vanish depending on presence and interaction.

The experience is slow, atmospheric, and accumulative. Visitors uncover Anna’s story not through exposition, but through mood, fragments, and proximity. Over time, they are drawn into her world until, in the final act, they embody villagers watching history repeat itself unless they choose otherwise.

RAN merges archival research, spatial design, and AI technology to create a living history not to simulate the past, but to force a confrontation with timeless questions: What makes us complicit? When do we speak up? And what happens if we don’t?

RAN - an immersive installation about the dark side of 1760s Bohuslän

Emma Stüffe

Production Designer

Biography

Emma Stüffe is a visual artist based in Gothenburg, known for her emotionally driven abstract work exploring perception, color, and neurodesign. Her practice bridges fine art and social engagement, with past collaborations including public art workshops for marginalized women and immersive exhibition projects. With a growing interest in XR and spatial storytelling, she brings a tactile, intuitive sensibility to interdisciplinary formats.

Aviwe Apleni

Director

Biography

Aviwe Apleni is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker working across drawing, painting, animation, and moving image. His practice is intuitive and process-driven, often exploring identity, presence, discomfort, and surreal states. With a background in advertising, he values self-initiated methods that resist instant gratification and favor deep immersion. Animation has become a key extension of his work, offering both total creative freedom and a space for sustained experimentation.

Anna Maria Joakimsdottir-Hutri

Director & Writer

Biography

Anna Maria Joakimsdottir-Hutri is a Finnish-Swedish writer-director working in film, theatre, and interdisciplinary performance. She holds a Master’s in Directing and Dramaturgy from the University of the Arts Helsinki and has directed both fiction films and documentary works. Her storytelling explores power, perception, and the limits of language—often through characters who are outsiders, visionaries, or both. Her previous film Who Stands Up for Alvar has been screened in municipalities across Sweden to spark political dialogue. Anna Maria is also founder of Tottemo Production, where she develops work that is intimate and radical.

Jesper Cederholm

Composer

Biography

Jesper Cederholm is a DJ and composer whose work moves within electronic music, drawing on slow-burning, atmospheric structures with echoes of early electronic traditions. In RAN, he composes the music for the project’s different phases and co-develops the interaction design, shaping sonic trigger points and audience-responsive atmospheres. His approach is highly attentive and process-driven, grounding musical decisions in close listening, narrative intention, and insights into human behavior.

Ylva Olsson

Visual Artist & Producer

Biography

Ylva Olsson is a visual artist and cultural practitioner whose work centers on memory, traces, and the quiet narratives embedded in everyday life. With a background spanning fine art, film studies, and long-term work in film production and development, she brings a rare sensitivity for both artistic process and collective structures. In RAN, her practice resonates with the project’s core questions of witnessing, remembrance, and how fragments of lived experience can be reactivated to form a shared moral archive.