Nine works, seven artists, three seas

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 participants in a makerspace by the sea, asked to assign colours to climate emotions. Grey for anxiety. Yellow for hope. Green for balance. A striking degree of agreement between people whose lives had almost nothing else in common.

EIKΟΛΟΓΙΑ (EIKOLOGIA) - Gen Daquinan, Mytilene, Lesvos. Thirty young people aged fifteen to seventeen, nine workshops, cameras, a zine. A visual ecology, in which looking closely at your own island becomes a form of care for it.

BETWEEN TIMEFRAMES - Anđela Bugarija, Bibinje. Thirty-six residents, from eighteen to eighty, lending family photographs of a coastline that has since been rebuilt. Restaged in the same locations, with bodies placed into the changed landscape.

The Blue Residency

Six works, made between August and October 2025 by six emerging artists working in studios, galleries, community spaces and on open coastal sites - with monthly online sessions connecting all three countries.

AVTRYCK - Darja Nordberg & Martina Claesson, with glassblower and visual artist Bevan Tako. Three large transparent glass sculptures cast from bark and clay moulds. Neither artist had worked in glass before. Each mould shifted slightly with reuse, so every piece carries the record of its own making.

TONER - Nordberg & Claesson, with Bevan Tako. The community's colour research, translated directly into coloured glass. Each object is one emotion, as a room full of people in Gothenburg defined it.

VESSELS - Aspasia Gianneta, Lesvos. Nine ceramic sculptures whose forms recall the amphorae once traded across the Aegean. Gianneta's vessels hold water but cannot carry it away. "VESSELS is a study of care - for material, place, and emotion."

CURRENTS OF LESVOS - Apo Gonidellis, Lesvos. Four photographic collages assembled from images taken, chosen and arranged by refugee and local youth. Currents of migration, tourism, drought and personal change, layered into single compositions.

I'MPRINT - Anđela Bugarija, Bibinje. A twenty-minute dance film in three miniatures, merging choreography made on land with underwater archival footage shot by Đani Iglić, a local diver. Bodies enter environments they cannot survive in.

TALES OF THE SEA - Kristina Bugarija, Bibinje. Three paintings, acrylic on canvas, worked with shells, pebbles and wire. The shells and pebbles for biodiversity; the wire-thin, artificial, bright - for civilisational progress.

The thread

Read together, an argument appears that no single work makes on its own.

Every one of these pieces begins with someone who is not an artist. A fisherman choosing a colour. A teenager choosing a photograph. An eighty-year-old choosing which image to lend. A diver choosing what to film. The artwork is the second thing that happens.

And every one of them treats a feeling as data. Grief, dread, attachment, the particular ache of watching a familiar shoreline change - these are not decorations placed on top of climate science. In this project they are the material.

All nine works are documented in full in D3.1 Artworks, available from the project.