Holding On and Letting Go: A Throwback to the Fourth Round of Local Urban Labs
From a photographer handing his camera to twin siblings in a fire-scarred village, to mirrors and salt on the shores of a contested gulf, water carried through the streets of Vienna in shared vessels, pilgrimage walks along a buried canal in Gdańsk, and a harbour terminal transformed into a canvas for climate justice, Round IV of Turning the Tide’s Local Urban Labs was the final chapter, and it knew it.
Four rounds in, Turning the Tide had something rare: a body of work to look back on. The fourth and final Local Urban Labs carried that weight with them, not as pressure, but as depth. Each city arrived at this closing chapter with its own accumulated language, its own relationships, its own unresolved questions. And each answered the moment in a way that felt entirely its own. Here’s a look back at all four.
Evoia, Greece — The story of a place
For the fourth and final round in Evoia, Artit brought together two artists who couldn’t look more different on the surface, and yet kept circling back to the same question: how does a place hold onto what’s happened to it?
Thodoris Nikolaou came with a long relationship with Northern Evoia, he grew up in Chalkis, close to the communities devastated by the 2021 wildfires and the floods that followed. His project Ancestors unfolds in four chapters. The first two, Fire-Flood and Aftermath, draw from his own archive, the disaster as it happened, the scorched landscape it left behind. The Cycle of Trauma slows further into Polaroid diptychs, sitting with the strange, damaged intimacy between people and land that has hurt them and been hurt in return. But the heart of the project is Twins: Thodoris found his way to Kastri, a remote village in the north of the island, and to twin siblings Marianiki and Christos Kouvelis. Rather than photographing them, he handed them back the tools, their own photographic cameras and let them document their world on their own terms through photovoice. What came back is less a story about Kastri than a story told from inside it.
Yannis Mantzaris arrived through a different door: degrees in physics and product design, an MA in Geo-design from the Design Academy Eindhoven, and a persistent fascination with how climate, politics, and infrastructure quietly carve up the spaces people share. In Evoia, that question led him out onto the Evoikos Gulf and into a sea that turns out to be far more divided than it looks. Protected posidonia meadows, licensed and unlicensed fish farms, a rejected plan for floating solar installations, the slow invisible damage of eutrophication, abandoned phantom nets. From months of conversations with scientists, fishermen, activists, and cultural workers, he built Scarring Boundaries: Renegotiating the Surface an installation of mirrors, steel, salt, and concealed lighting. The mirrors hold fragments of the maps and testimonies he gathered. There is something deliberately unsettled about them: close and communal, the way coastal life often is, but also closing things off, the way a sea becomes once everyone starts claiming their portion.
Both pieces came together publicly in Íchni II, a group show curated by Valia Almpani at Artit’s space in Piraeus in May 2026 and for the first time, all eight artists who have ever passed through the Evoia Local Urban Lab, along with the two artists that participated in Gdansk & Vienna’s International Lab were in the same room: Theodore Nikolaou and Yannis Mantzaris alongside Christina Maridaki, Giorgos Gerontides, Angela Liosi, Maria Gouveli, Froso Papadimitriou, Eleni Vrettakou, Jenny Marketou and Eva Andronikidou. The choice of Piraeus, a city that has always defined itself by its relationship to the sea, gave the gathering its own quiet resonance. The Evoia lab closes here. But the portrait doesn’t feel finished so much as handed over.
Vienna, Austria — Water as a World
By the fourth round, the Wiener Bildungsakademie had built a distinctive territory in Vienna: one where water is never only a subject, but always a medium, a question, a shared experience. Round IV pushed that further still, into the connection between physical and digital worlds.
Reinhold Zisser and Sonya Darrow developed Watersculptures, a participatory project that took water as both material and metaphor. Across a series of workshops at different water environments, the Danube, Seestadt, the Lobau, participants collected, carried, and mixed water, transforming it into a shared substance that connects places, experiences, and perspectives. Rather than producing a single fixed artwork, the project generated a collective process: participants developed their own artistic responses, resulting in a diverse set of works ranging from minimal gestures to more complex installations. The final presentation at the LLLLL artist-run space in Seestadt Aspern brought together approximately twenty works and remained publicly accessible for a full week, art that didn’t close when the lab did.
Sebastian Schmidt, together with Viktoria Becker, approached water from an entirely different angle, as the hidden resource behind the digital technologies that define contemporary life. The Weight of a Prompt examined the environmental cost of artificial intelligence: the often invisible relationship between data processing, energy consumption, and the vast quantities of water consumed by data centres. Through a participatory workshop and a performative final presentation at the MuseumsQuartier, the project translated these abstract systems into embodied experience, movement, repetition, physical tension becoming tools to explore what digital processes actually cost the material world. The performance made the invisible undeniably felt.
Two works, two registers: one inviting people to carry water through the city together, the other asking them to feel what it means to send a single prompt. Both, in their own way, doing what the best of these labs have always done, closing the gap between what we know about water and what we actually experience.
Gdańsk, Poland — Walking the Hidden Flow
The fourth Gdańsk Local Urban Lab, hosted by IKM, brought together two artists whose practices met at the same point from very different directions: both, ultimately, were about learning to stay with something, a place, a material, a slow and careful act of attention.
Viktorya Myronyuk spent her residency tracing the water and canal systems of Gdańsk, meeting experts and following the history of the Radunia Canal, a waterway that runs partly hidden beneath roads and buildings, covered over by urban development, its presence invisible to most of the people who live above it. From this research, she developed Along the Water, a performative and meditative walk for small groups of eight participants, beginning at IKM and continuing through more than a dozen locations connected to the city’s waterways. At each stop, she combined storytelling, singing, performative gesture, and brief exercises, sometimes performing alone, sometimes drawing the group in directly. The walk became a form of mobile workshop, grounded in interaction and shared experience. And it worked on more than one level: the history of Gdańsk’s rivers and canals, the consequences of burying water systems, the city’s vulnerability to flooding, but also something more personal, an invitation to each participant to consider their own inner waterscape: where things flow freely, where they pool, where they block.
Anna Kotkiewicz worked in a different register: the intimate, concentrated attention of hands on clay. Her project Shoreline Boundaries took the form of a workshop for a maximum of eight participants, working with porcelain as a material that preserves the traces of touch and gesture. Using water, hand pressure, and the movement of fingers, participants created small relief tiles inspired by the Gdańsk shoreline, an act of making that opened, slowly, into reflection on how even the smallest actions leave traces, both in the material itself and in the natural environment. After the session, the works were dried, fired, and glazed, and later collected by the participants. Anna’s sculptural presentation extended these themes into a more formal artistic outcome, sitting alongside the workshop as its counterpart.
One project moved through the city in small groups, voice and water and collective attention spilling across the urban landscape. The other stayed still, hands in clay, in an intimate encounter with material and memory. Together, they mapped Gdańsk’s relationship with water from two very different but equally necessary directions.
Stockholm, Sweden — Terminal Reflection
For its fourth and final Local Urban Lab, Intercult chose Stadsgårdsterminalen, a working harbour terminal on the edge of Stockholm’s waterfront — and turned it into the setting for something that felt, from the very beginning, like a closing act that earned its scale.
The forth Local Urban Lab brought together two artists, Jonna Bo Lammers and Agnieszka Stobierska, both of whom had developed site-specific works for the terminal’s walls and windows that explored climate justice, urban development, and collective resilience. Jonna’s bold, colourful murals addressed social issues with a directness and visual energy that made the space feel alive, her paintings carrying the kind of conviction that public art often reaches for but rarely achieves. Agnieszka works at the intersection of art, ecology, and civic imagination, transforming public spaces into platforms for reflection and engagement; at Stadsgårdsterminalen, her work opened the terminal outward, inviting visitors to sit with questions about what cities owe to the living world around them. Both artists were present to talk through the background of their concepts as visitors moved through the space, the works on the walls and windows becoming the starting point for conversations that went well beyond what was painted.
There is something right about Intercult ending Round IV here, in a working harbour, at the edge of the water the project has always circled back to, with two artists whose work insists that public space is never neutral and that art made in it carries responsibility. Vlady’s quiet street interventions and Ajja’s collective mural journey from Round III still echo here. This is the same city, the same water, the same conviction, only the terminal is grander, and the conversation has had four rounds to find its depth.
A Project That Has Earned Its Ending
Round IV didn’t try to outdo what came before. Instead, it completed it. In Evoia, Artit handed the work back to the communities it had always been about, closing with a reunion that showed just how much ground had been covered. In Vienna, the Wiener Bildungsakademie connected the physical and digital dimensions of water in ways that felt urgent and genuinely new. In Gdańsk, IKM created two practices, walking and making, that gave participants different but equally lasting ways of understanding the city they live in. In Stockholm, Intercult transformed a harbour terminal into a space of reflection and handed it to an audience who came to see art and left holding something harder to name.
Four cities. Four rounds. An extraordinary body of work, built together, piece by piece, in the face of the climate crisis and with it.
