WATERFRONTS Concluding Conference

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 artivism in practice, the triangle that connects artists, communities, and climate change, and the awkwardness that sits inside it.

Before the break, documentary interviews with Dutch artists working on climate themes were discussed live: the same problem, a different coastline, a different set of instincts about what art is permitted to do.

The evening

In the afternoon, people walked around Zadar's old town and its waterfront. Then we went to Bibinje.

The field conference took place directly on the Adriatic, with Đani Iglić - the local diver whose underwater footage of the seabed, marine life, and pollution became half of the Croatian dance film I'MPRINT. There was no stage. There was the sea, and a man who had spent his life beneath it, describing what has changed there.

Afterwards, the Community Event exhibition closed. The Croatian artworks were shown one final time in the place where the community made them, to the people who made them.

That is the whole argument of this project, compressed into one evening. Not that art explains climate change. That art can be made in a place, by the people of that place, about what is happening to it, and that this does something which a report cannot.

What was said

Discussion across the day kept returning to transfer. Not to what WATERFRONTS achieved, but to what it makes possible elsewhere: how artistic and community-led approaches can enter policy, practice, and cultural programming, and what a coastal community actually needs in order to keep this work going once the funding stops.

The WATERFRONTS Toolkit gathers the methods. The policy recommendations gather what communities asked us to say on their behalf.

The conference was held in a hybrid format, with the main sessions livestreamed.