Blog & Press Releases

Every project reaches its final milestone. The more interesting question is what remains afterwards. For WATERFRONTS, the answer is not simply a collection of reports, artworks or events. It is a methodology, a network of people and organisations, and a different way of thinking about the relationship between culture, environmental change and community resilience. Over two years, WATERFRONTS brought together artists, researchers, municipalities, cultural organisations and loc

Coastal and waterfront communities are often the first to experience environmental change. Rising seas, water scarcity, shifting shorelines and the gradual loss of familiar landscapes reshape not only the places people live, but also how they feel about them. Alongside these physical changes comes something harder to measure: the worry, grief and uncertainty many people experience in response to a changing climate—often described as eco-anxiety. The WATERFRONTS project set ou

WATERFRONTS has published the WATERFRONTS Toolkit, a free practical guide that helps artists, cultural organisations, municipalities and community partners apply the project’s arts-led approach to climate resilience in coastal and waterfront communities. The Toolkit is designed to be transferable: it separates the reusable method from the record of what WATERFRONTS did in practice, so that other organisations can adapt the approach to their own local context rather than simpl

At the beginning of WATERFRONTS, before any art was made, forty-six people in Sweden, Greece and Croatia sat down with us to describe what climate change was doing to the place they live. The findings were not surprising. Rising temperatures. Water scarcity. Biodiversity loss. Emotional strain, described in language that people were often slightly embarrassed to use. And, everywhere, a gap between what environmental policy says and what environmental policy does - policies pe

WATERFRONTS held its Concluding Conference, “Culture for Coastal Resilience”, on 8 June 2026 in Zadar and Bibinje, Croatia. The two-part international event marked the close of the project’s dissemination programme and brought together artists, project participants, cultural and creative sector representatives, non-governmental and civil society organisations, and members of the public. Hosted by the Croatian partner IM Industries, the conference shared results from all three

On 8 June 2026, the WATERFRONTS Concluding Conference began at Centar za mlade Zadar and finished on a beach in Bibinje, standing on the coastline the project spent two years talking about. The morning We opened the Conference with the artworks. All nine works produced across Gothenburg, Bibinje, and Mytilene are shown together for the first time. Glass from Sweden. Dance film and painting from Croatia. Ceramics and photographic collage from Lesvos. Then a conversation about

Over two years, WATERFRONTS produced nine artworks. They were made by seven artists and one collaborating glass artist, across three coastlines and three European seas, in two distinct phases. This is all of them. Community Artivism Three works, made with communities rather than about them. Ninety-one people contributed directly. Around four hundred and fifty more encountered the results. FORM, COLOR & EMOTIONS - Darja Nordberg & Martina Claesson, Gothenburg. Twenty-five part

The title is a Greek pun that turns out to be a thesis. EIKΟΛΟΓΙΑ - eikologia - folds together εικόνα, image, and οικολογία, ecology. A visual ecology. Seeing as an act of care. It was made by thirty young people on Lesvos, aged fifteen to seventeen, working with the artist Gen Daquinan across nine workshops. Who The participants came from villages at the edges of the island. Low-income households. Rural, remote, and largely absent from any conversation about the island's env

Bibinje is a small coastal town near Zadar, generally described - to the irritation of the people who live there - as a suburb of it. It has a fishing tradition, a maritime memory, and a coastline that has been rearranged in a single lifetime by tourism, urbanisation and environmental change. Recently the railway was reactivated and the industrial zone expanded. Residents describe both as things that happened to Bibinje rather than in it: daily life disrupted, public space de

Ask someone what climate change makes them feel, and you will usually get a sentence they have said before. Ask them what colour anxiety is, and something different happens. That was the premise of FORM, COLOR & EMOTIONS, a participatory workshop series led by Swedish artists Darja Nordberg and Martina Claesson in Gothenburg, and the first of the three Community Artivism works that WATERFRONTS produced. The room The workshops took place at Omställningslabbet, a creative maker

A dancer on the shore, a diver beneath it Two of the six Blue Residency works were made on the Adriatic, in and around Bibinje, between August and October 2025. They could not be more different in form. They are asking the same question. I'MPRINT Anđela Bugarija is a dance artist. I'MPRINT is a twenty-minute dance film, built from three miniatures that can also stand alone as solos. Above the water: choreography made on land, site-specific, each sequence responding to the par

When the WATERFRONTS consortium gathered in Gothenburg this October, on the last day, Götaland Engineering hosted two back-to-back sessions that shaped the policy and advocacy backbone of the project. Unlike traditional policy labs, these workshops brought artists, engineers, policymakers, and community practitioners into the same room, not to debate, but to imagine. Our approach was simple: start from lived experience, surface anxieties, and then build strategies for change.

Drawing on its work with communities in Sweden, Greece and Croatia, WATERFRONTS has set out a series of policy recommendations urging decision-makers at European, national, regional and local level to embed participatory, arts-based methods into climate adaptation, coastal management and environmental education. The recommendations were developed collaboratively by the project’s three partners, coordinated by GOTALAND (Sweden) and informed by associated partners, drawing on t

In mid-October (13–17 October), the initiators of the WATERFRONTS initiative – LATRA (Greece), GOTALAND Engineering AB (Sweden) and IM Industries (Croatia) – convened in Gothenburg for a transnational meeting. Alongside project partners, the gathering brought together participating artists and experts in engineering, restoration, ecology and cultural practice from Sweden, Greece, Croatia, and the Netherlands. Following the completion of the WATERFRONTS project planning phase

Six emerging artists from Sweden, Greece and Croatia produced six new artworks during the WATERFRONTS Blue Residency, an artistic residency that ran from August to October 2025 across the project’s three partner countries. Together with the three works created earlier through Community Artivism, these complete the project’s nine artworks. During the residency, each artist worked with local mentoring from their partner organisation, IM Industries (Croatia), LATRA (Greece) or G

How do you turn a complex idea like "climate resilience" into a tangible reality? For the WATERFRONTS project, the answer lies not in top-down directives, but in a dynamic, hands-on process of co-creation. The project's methodology is carefully designed to be iterative, inclusive, and empowering, ensuring that the solutions it generates are developed with and by the communities themselves. Let's take a look inside the step-by-step journey that will bring WATERFRONTS to life.

Through Community Artivism, WATERFRONTS produced the first three of its nine artworks, working directly with residents of three European coastal communities, Gothenburg (Sweden), Mytilene on Lesvos (Greece) and Bibinje near Zadar (Croatia), to turn local experiences of climate change into shared creative works. Artivism combines artistic expression with activism. In WATERFRONTS it is used to make complex environmental and emotional issues more accessible, and to give a voice

A single drop of water can create ripples that spread far and wide. The WATERFRONTS project is built on a similar idea: that targeted, local actions in three diverse European waterfronts—Gothenburg (Sweden), Lesvos (Greece), and Zadar (Croatia)—can inspire a wave of change across the continent. While the project's heart lies in deep, community-level engagement, its vision is resolutely transnational. The challenges of climate change and eco-anxiety are not confined to one cit

Climate change is often discussed in global terms—rising sea levels, international agreements, and carbon emissions. But its impacts are felt locally and personally, and they do not affect everyone equally. Vulnerable and marginalized communities are frequently the most exposed to environmental risks and the least equipped to cope with them. The WATERFRONTS project is founded on a deep commitment to social inclusion, ensuring that those most affected by climate change are at

How can a painting help us understand marine biology? What does a community sculpture have to do with mental health? At first glance, the connection between socially-engaged arts, marine sciences, and mental healthcare might not seem obvious. However, the WATERFRONTS project is built on the very principle that these three fields are not just connected, but essential to one another in building resilient coastal communities. Climate change is a complex, multifaceted crisis. It