Waterfronts Blog

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

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.

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

How do you turn a complex idea like "climate resilience" into a tangible reality? For the WATERFRONTS project, the answer lies not in...

A single drop of water can create ripples that spread far and wide. The WATERFRONTS project is built on a similar idea: that targeted,...

Climate change is often discussed in global terms—rising sea levels, international agreements, and carbon emissions. But its impacts are...

How can a painting help us understand marine biology? What does a community sculpture have to do with mental health? At first glance, the...

The term "eco-anxiety" might be relatively new, but the feeling it describes is becoming increasingly common. It's the persistent worry...

From April 14–17, 2025, the island of Lesvos became the heart of artistic and environmental innovation as it hosted the WATERFRONTS...

Over the past months, the WATERFRONTS project brought together artists, educators, scientists, mental health professionals, and local...

In January 2025, WATERFRONTS brought together partners and selected artists from Sweden, Greece, and Croatia for its highly anticipated...

We are thrilled to announce the selection of six talented artists & cultural practitioners who will spearhead the creative vision of the...

WATERFRONTS invites applications from artists based in Sweden, Greece, and Croatia to participate in a transformative, cross-border...

OPEN CALL: Join the WATERFRONTS Co-Design Sessions! Are you an artist, cultural worker, environmental expert, policymaker, educator, or...