Is anxiety green or grey?

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-space on the water. The location said what the project wanted to say - that this work belongs beside the sea, not in a seminar room. It also made the workshops harder to reach, a tension the artists named honestly afterwards.

Twenty-five people came. Swedish-born residents. Newly arrived migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe, some with very little Swedish. Fishermen and maritime workers. Climate activists. People with disabilities, people from low-income households. Ages twenty-five to sixty.

They were recruited partly through social media and partly by being stopped on the street and invited in for coffee and cake. The artists ran three short workshops rather than one long one, on the reasoning that most people will give you an hour and almost nobody will give you a day. It worked.

The exercises

Colour play. Sketching. Paper cutting. Writing. All of it circling one question: how does the future feel?

Is anxiety green or grey? Is the future sharp-edged or rounded?

These are not clever questions. They are questions that let someone answer without needing the vocabulary, or the confidence, or the language. Discussion followed, and could be anonymous where people preferred it. For participants who could not easily articulate eco-anxiety in Swedish, or in words at all, colour was a door.

What emerged

The artists half-expected chaos. What they found was consensus.

Grey, for anxiety, chosen by more participants than any other colour. Yellow for hope - and, when people drew rather than coloured, a great many suns. Green for balance. Orange for energy.

Twenty-five people, wildly different lives, largely agreeing. Nordberg described being struck by it: that there was a pattern, and that so many people felt the same way.

Nobody had told them what to feel. They had simply been asked, in a form that let them answer.

What it became

Those colours did not stay on paper. The workshop results became the foundation of two series of blown-glass objects - AVTRYCK and TONER - made later during the Blue Residency with glassblower and visual artist Bevan Tako, using local materials and sustainable production.

TONER is, quite literally, the community's emotional consensus rendered in coloured glass. Yellow for hope. Grey for anxiety. Green for balance. Each object holds one of the answers that twenty-five people in Gothenburg gave to a question about how the future feels.

What the artists learned

Participants described the process as challenging and rewarding, and many were visibly proud when they understood that their contributions would be turned into glass. Several asked when the exhibition would be.

The artists came away with two lessons they were candid about. The venue, however symbolically right, needed to be more central. And colour deserved to be treated more seriously as a research method - not as an icebreaker before the real work, but as the real work.