Into New Territory: A Throwback to the Third Round of Local Urban Labs
From a fairy tale born out of wildfire testimony in Evoia, to bat echolocation in a Gdańsk park, water as choreography in Vienna, and a living mural painted across the streets of Stockholm, Round III of Turning the Tide’s Local Urban Labs was something else entirely.
By the third round, Turning the Tide had found its stride. The labs were bolder, the approaches more experimental, the connections between art, science, and community more deeply woven. Across 2025, four cities produced work that pushed into genuinely new territory, not just documenting the climate crisis, but finding stranger, more unexpected ways to make it felt. Here’s a look back at all four.
Evoia, Greece — Fairy Tales, Ruins, and the Weight of What Remains
Round III brought a landmark shift for Artit in Evoia: for the first time, the Local Urban Lab was blended with the International Lab, creating an unprecedented space where local and international artists worked side by side, exchanged methodologies, and explored the island’s climate realities together. The focus remained on the devastating 2021 wildfires and the floods that followed but this time, the lens widened to examine how political negligence, economic opportunism, and failures in climate knowledge had amplified what nature set in motion. Artists undertook study visits to affected villages and to the fire’s point of origin, and participated in educational webinars with atmospheric physicist Marilena Gidarakou, bridging scientific understanding with artistic inquiry.
The results were presented in Íchni: Memories of the Future, a public exhibition held by Artit at Tetartokyklion in Chalcis, a venue chosen for its view over the Euripus Strait, where the tidal current reverses direction multiple times a day, a natural metaphor for instability and transformation. Froso Papadimitriou created The Golden Pine Cone, a watercolour and fine-line fairy tale woven from testimonies collected in the villages of Kourkouloi, Kexries, and Skepasti, alongside Co-existence, a collaborative canvas made with local children using threads and acrylics, inspired by the myth of the three fates, where barely visible white threads slowly gain colour and meaning through children’s hands. Eleni Vrettakou‘s Un/Making Ground gathered the physical residue of disaster, charred pine, silted mud, and eroded surfaces, reshaping them into unfinished sculptures that refuse permanence and embrace the slow work of care and time. Together, these works held complexity: not just loss, but the politics behind it, and the possibility of meaning-making in its wake.
Vienna, Austria — Water in the Body, Water on Screen
Vienna’s third Local Urban Lab, once again implemented by the Wiener Bildungsakademie, asked a more visceral question than before: how can we experience water, not just understand it intellectually, but feel it, move with it, sense it changing? The answer came through two very different but complementary practices.
The artistic duo Adrian Dorfmeister and Simeon Ohlsen developed a performative practice that translated the dynamics of water, flow, resistance, and transformation into choreographed physical movement in the public spaces of Seestadt Aspern. Their performance Do You Relate left no lasting objects, only moments: a temporary recalibration of how audiences inhabit and sense their environment. They also brought this embodied approach directly into classrooms, running school workshops that invited students to engage with environmental change through their own bodies, a quietly radical act of ecological education. Hans Hofer provided the other dimension: his film See Grund explored the Grundlsee through a cinematic language attuned to mood, atmosphere, and the kind of subtle change that only slowing down reveals. Ephemeral performance and lasting film image, together, through formats facilitated by the Wiener Bildungsakademie, they gave water a presence that was both felt and seen.
Gdańsk, Poland — Listening for the Invisible
The third Gdańsk Local Urban Lab, hosted by the Institute of Urban Culture, brought two residencies that had one remarkable thing in common: both were about learning to perceive what human senses normally miss.
Iwo Kondefer‘s exhibition No Darkness Is Fear, History and Future of Orunia (28–31 August 2025, Stacja Orunia / Gdański Archipelag Kultury) invited visitors into the nocturnal world of Orunia Park’s bat community, moving across the years 1978, 2015, 2025, and 2040 through field recordings, photography, video, and a radio play. On 30 August, the sound walk Listen to What Cannot Be Heard extended the project into the park itself, culminating in participants using an echolocation signal detector to actually perceive bat sounds beyond the range of human hearing, technology turned into a tool of ecological imagination. Linda Lemon‘s Marine Weaves – on Ghost Nets and Ecology through Art and Collective Action (18–25 September 2025, GridArthub) tackled the Baltic Sea’s ghost nets — abandoned fishing gear that continues trapping marine life and spreading microplastics long after its use. Her opening installation transformed recovered nets into hanging swings, and her basket-weaving workshops invited participants to make functional objects from marine debris, turning waste into care. A discussion with Olga Sarna from the Mare Foundation grounded the poetic work in the hard realities of Baltic marine ecology. One project taught people to hear bats; the other asked them to weave with nets that should never have been lost at sea. Both made the invisible undeniable.
Stockholm, Sweden — Everything Is Connected
Stockholm’s third Local Urban Lab landed at one of the city’s most significant moments in recent years: the grand opening of Södermalmstorg and Mälartrappan at Slussen on 6 June 2025, Swedish National Day, drawing over 5,000 visitors to a reimagined piece of the city’s waterfront. Intercult was right there in the middle of it, presenting the outcomes of Round III through two artists whose approaches to the city and climate couldn’t have been more different, yet felt entirely of a piece.
Vlady scattered subtle interventions across Stockholm and mapped them all at Södermalmstorg, ephemeral signs placed in ordinary urban contexts that quietly reference the imperceptibility of climate change: rising waters, shifting boundaries, the slow creep of transformation that society keeps failing to notice. Calling it “discreet art in the streets“, Vlady made the city itself a text to be read. Ajja took the opposite route: beginning a mural at Björns trädgård alongside two young artists, she continued along Götgatan on a cargo bike, inviting passersby to contribute to the evolving painting, before completing her canvas at Södermalmstorg, a work shaped by childhood memories of Stockholm’s waterways, climate anxiety, family, and belonging. “Allting hör ihop, everything is connected,” she reflects, and her painting lived those words. Between Vlady’s quiet traces and Ajja’s collective journey, Intercult and the city of Stockholm showed that public art and climate action don’t just coexist; they can be the same thing.
A Project That Keeps Growing
Round III made one thing unmistakably clear: Turning the Tide is not standing still. In Evoia, Artit broke new ground by merging local and international labs, creating richer conversations and braver work. In Vienna, the Wiener Bildungsakademie pushed past the visual and into the bodily, putting water in motion and in classrooms. In Gdańsk, the Institute of Urban Culture challenged audiences to listen beyond what human ears can normally hear, and to weave with what the sea discards. In Stockholm, Intercult turned a city opening into a public act of environmental reflection, reaching thousands of people who simply came to celebrate a new square and left carrying something more.
Three rounds in, the project has proved that it grows more ambitious and more necessary with each iteration. And there’s still more to come.
