Where does an artist stand between awareness and activism?

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 perceived as top-down, inconsistent, or driven by interests located somewhere other than the community affected by them.

Art, participants agreed, was unusually good at opening a conversation that would otherwise close. It sparks dialogue. It creates room for reflection. It does this without polarising or alienating people, which almost nothing else in the climate conversation manages.

And then the artists in the room raised a question that we have not been able to put down since.

The question

Where, exactly, is an artist supposed to stand?

There is a spectrum. At one end, awareness-raising: making the invisible visible, offering people a way into a subject they have been avoiding, holding open a space where difficult feeling can be spoken. At the other, activism: taking a position, naming an interest, demanding a change.

Many artists in the co-design sessions said openly that they did not know where on that line their work belonged - or where it ought to belong. Move too far toward activism, and you lose the very audience the work exists to reach, and possibly your artistic integrity along with them. Stay too close to awareness, and you make beautiful objects about a catastrophe while the catastrophe proceeds.

This is not a comfortable question, and the project did not resolve it.

What the three countries said

In Sweden, the sessions brought together environmental scientists, artists, architects, psychologists, citizens and policymakers, and found a persistent fragmentation between all of them. Art was identified as a bridge - a way to provoke thought and encourage action without instilling panic, connecting expert knowledge to public feeling. The difficulty was holding the attention of younger people in a saturated media environment.

In Croatia, the picture was harder. Bibinje, a reactivated railway and an expanded industrial zone had produced exactly the mistrust you would predict. Residents and policymakers alike described feeling excluded from decisions. Artists observed that these subjects rarely came up even within their own circles. And several asked the bleakest version of the question: given how much damage is already done, what meaningful action remains?

In Greece, young people emerged as the clearest constituency - those who feel the material and emotional impacts most acutely, and who possess the creativity to respond, provided somebody positions them as co-creators rather than as an audience.

What we think now, two years on

We do not have an answer. We have a set of observations that we would offer to anyone standing where those artists stood.

Messages that work in a progressive city do not work in a town whose economy depends on the thing you are criticising. Cultural competence is not a nicety; it is the difference between being listened to and being dismissed.

Art can carry an argument that a report cannot, precisely because it does not announce itself as an argument.

The artists were not asking to be told which side to be on. They were asking for tools and support to navigate the space between - confidently, and without surrendering the thing that makes their work capable of reaching anyone in the first place.

Whether the answer is any good is for the next artist to decide.