Going Deeper: A Throwback to the Second Round of Local Urban Labs
From Evoia’s flood-scarred plains to the hidden streams of Gdańsk, the perception-shifting installations of Vienna, and a golden-flag protest on a Stockholm street: Round II of Turning the Tide’s Local Urban Labs proved that this project was only getting started.
If Round I set the tone, Round II turned up the volume. Across the autumn and winter of 2024, the four cities of the Turning the Tide network pushed their Local Urban Labs into richer, more layered territory, new artists, new methods, and a deepening sense of what it means to make art in the face of ecological crisis. The communities were already waiting. The conversations were already in motion. And the works that emerged were extraordinary.
Here’s a look back at all four.
Evoia, Greece — Grief, Memory, and the Invisible Web
Building on the foundation laid in Round I, Artit welcomed two new artists to Evoia for the second lab: Angela Liosi and Maria Gouveli. Their focus was the island’s floods, disasters that, unlike the wildfires before them, left a quieter, less photographed kind of devastation. A “Passing the Baton” meeting brought all four artists from both rounds together, ensuring the wisdom of Giorgos Gerontides and Christina Maridaki would flow into this new chapter, a beautiful act of community-building as much as project management. The programme once again opened with a workshop led by Dr Spyros Bofylatos, whose frameworks on ecological justice and art as activism set the stage for both artists’ explorations.
Angela Liosi’s Water Walk is a sculptural installation that stops you and refuses to let you look away: an ark-like, amphibious form born from multiple species, created to honour the animals, livestock, and wildlife, turtles, lost in North Evoia’s catastrophic floods. This is not an ark of salvation; it is an ark of mourning, a direct challenge to the comforting refrain that “at least no human life was lost.” The installation will remain at Mela’s building in Limni until 2027, a long-term memorial and witness. Maria Gouveli’s Nexus Project took an entirely different but equally moving path: an interactive, rhizomatic map of the Lelantine Plain that charts not just geography, but emotion, memory, and the lived experience of living alongside a landscape shaped by water. Drawing on dynamicist theory and eco-feminist perspectives, it’s a map that branches like a river delta, messy, rich, and alive with interconnection.
Vienna, Austria — Slowing Down to See
The second Vienna Local Urban Lab, implemented by the Wiener Bildungsakademie, brought together Daniel Böswirth and Daniil Sukhov around a deceptively simple question: how do we actually perceive water in a world reshaped by climate change?
Daniel Böswirth approached water as a sensory and conceptual phenomenon, not as spectacle, but as something that rewards stillness and attention. Through installations and process-based interventions, his work invited audiences to notice water’s dynamic qualities: how it transforms, reflects, and interacts with its surroundings in ways that are usually too slow or too subtle for us to register. Daniil Sukhov brought a filmmaker’s sensibility to the same territory, creating documentary-inflected visual narratives that tracked the presence of water in the rhythms of everyday urban life. Through workshops and public formats facilitated by the Wiener Bildungsakademie, both artists created spaces where audiences could engage with water not only intellectually but emotionally and where the gap between sustainability as an abstract idea and water as a lived, felt reality started to close.
Gdańsk, Poland — Restoring What Lies Beneath
Gdańsk’s second Local Urban Lab, developed through the Urban Culture Institute, ran from September to December 2024 and opened up two rich parallel strands: the hidden waterways buried beneath the city, and the endangered biodiversity of the Baltic Sea.
Zuzanna Kołodziej took on the underground streams of Tricity, creating two 3D animations, Free the Streams of Tricity, that visualise what Gdańsk might look like if selected buried waterways were restored to the city’s surface. Using camera tracking and immersive design, her work proposed an alternative urban imagination where infrastructure and nature are no longer adversaries. The journey there was just as powerful: a guided walk along the Kamienny Potok stream led by Rafał Kubiś (head of PTTK Sopot), and a role-playing workshop where participants were handed character cards representing a local boy, a creative soul, tadpoles, and marsh marigolds and asked to imagine the city’s future from each perspective. Meanwhile, Bartosh Zimniak led a strand devoted to the Baltic Sea’s fragile ecosystems: an educational field trip aboard a historic 1981 boat to the Hel Seal Sanctuary, a creative workshop at the MEWKA Foundation in Nowy Port with biomaterials specialist Blanka Byrwa, and an interactive educational game on endangered Baltic species, completed in early 2025 after the residency formally closed. Young participants from the Gdańsk Health Centre created Postcards for the Baltic Sea, handmade messages addressed directly to Nature, tender and urgent in equal measure.
Stockholm, Sweden — A Bridge Between Worlds
Stockholm’s second Local Urban Lab closed with a bang. On 28 November 2024, Intercult hosted A Bridge Between Worlds, a final event that brought together artists, climate researchers, academics, and policymakers to explore how creative practice can genuinely drive environmental action, opened by a welcome address from Iwona Preis.
Associate Professor Emma Stenström from the Stockholm School of Economics introduced the Inner Development Goals (IDG) framework and her method Bubbelhoppa (Bubble-Hopping), an approach that encourages people to step outside their professional and social bubbles to build the empathy and collaboration that real sustainability demands. Belarusian artist and activist Ludmila Christeseva then presented Jätterena Mälaren (Superclean Mälaren), her investigation into Sweden’s lake pollution. She handed out goodie bags of plastic construction materials, invited attendees to build imaginary fish sculptures, and screened a satirical video of herself making fish soup from lake waste, darkly funny, deeply uncomfortable, and exactly right. The evening closed with Marie-Andrée Robitaille, multidisciplinary circus artist and researcher, whose project Hope in Motion culminated in an outdoor performance in Intercult’s yard: participants carrying golden flags, staging a symbolic protest for hope. Messages were placed in a communal Bucket of Hope. It was joyful and defiant all at once, a perfect note on which to end.
A Project in Full Stride
What Round II made unmistakably clear is that Turning the Tide had found its rhythm. The labs were no longer just starting conversations; they were deepening them, building on what came before, passing knowledge between artists and cities, and producing works of real emotional and intellectual weight. In Evoia, art held space for the grief that disasters leave behind. In Vienna, it asked us to slow down and actually see the water around us. In Gdańsk, it reimagined the city from the perspective of buried streams and endangered sea creatures. In Stockholm, it dared to hope out loud.
Different artists, different approaches, different cities, but Artit, the Wiener Bildungsakademie, the Urban Culture Institute Gdańsk, and Intercult all pointed in the same direction: toward a more honest, more caring, more creative relationship with the living world. Round II didn’t just follow Round I. It answered it.
