Between 6 May and 3 August 2024, Gdańsk became a site of intensive artistic research, collaboration, and experimentation as two artists, Νatalia Revko and Weronika Zalewska, took part in a three-month local residency developed within the framework of Turning the Tide.
Their presence in the city formed part of a wider programme connecting artistic practice with water, ecology, urban space, and cultural memory. The residency was conceived not only as a space for individual artistic development, but also as a platform for exchange. Alongside developing their own projects, the selected artists presented their ideas and artistic concepts and supported the work of international residency artists, including Robyn Woolston, Katarzyna Piórek, and Eva Andronikidou. In Gdańsk, their activities unfolded through cultural mapping, artistic research, and the creation of a final work that was later presented in an online exhibition and shared through the Turning the Tide website, social media channels, and a one-day symposium.
Natalia Revko, one of the Ukrainian artists originally planned to participate in the project, carried out a three-month residency focused on the urban and social environments of Gdańsk. Her work developed through cultural mapping and artistic research, leading to the creation of Water of Interest, a live sound-streaming project presented on 25 June 2024. The audience was invited to experience a real-time transmission of sounds recorded by the artist while moving through the bastion areas of Dolne Miasto. Rivers, canals, and coastal zones became sources of a living soundscape, carrying traces of historical and political memory. In Revko’s work, water emerged not simply as an element of the landscape, but as a medium through which natural, social, and historical narratives could be heard intertwining in real time.
Weronika Zalewska’s residency followed a different but equally research-driven path. Initially, she planned to develop an experimental film in collaboration with scientists from the Institute of Oceanography at the University of Gdańsk, focusing on embodiment, relationality, and the Baltic Sea. As the residency progressed, however, communication difficulties and the limited availability of researchers at the Institute of Oceanology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Sopot required her to substantially revise the original concept. Rather than abandoning the project, Zalewska transformed the challenge into a new direction. In a series of interviews conducted during the summer of 2024, she asked researchers about their relationships with the organisms they studied, their bodily experiences during laboratory work and sea expeditions, the place of spontaneity and emotion within scientific structures, and their experiences as women in the scientific community.
What emerged from this process was a body of material attentive to stories, affects, and marginal experiences that usually remain outside formal academic publications. Zalewska was especially interested in what scientific language often excludes: intimacy, emotion, hesitation, and embodied knowledge. The visual layer of her video project drew on archival footage, creating a dialogue between contemporary testimony and historical imagery. The final version of the work was delivered in March 2025, and the artist also expressed her intention to continue this trajectory by participating in a future residency aboard a research vessel.
An important public moment within the Local Urban Lab was the Performativity Lab, held on 18 May. This event brought together sound art, performance, installation, and participatory composition in a programme that highlighted the interdisciplinary and experimental spirit of the wider project. The audience encountered artistic and sound installations by Zorka Wollny and Krzysztof “Arszyn” Topolski, as well as a live concert in which Wollny created a real- time composition together with the audience, while Arszyn built an evolving soundscape from field recordings. The event also marked the final opportunity to experience the installations by Wollny and Topolski, previously exhibited at the Urban Culture Institute in Gdańsk.
The evening culminated in the performance Manifesto of Hydrosexuality by the artistic duo cyber_nymphs, composed of Ewelina Jarosz and Justyna Górowska. Presented for the third time, this postmedia work unfolded as an immersive, corporeal-technological, and queer experience. Staged at the Urban Culture Institute, it proposed new ways of imagining the Blue Planet through expanded sensuality and more-than-human sexualities, situating these reflections within the broader context of multiple, overlapping crises. The performance added a speculative and radical dimension to the Local Urban Lab, showing how questions of water, embodiment, and ecological imagination can also be approached through bold and experimental artistic language.
The programme reached another important point on 25 June during the symposium day, when Weronika Zalewska presented her visual installation notatki umoczone. Conceived as a study of human relationships with the sea and water more broadly, the work brought together scans of historical illustrations of Baltic flora and fauna, encyclopedic entries on maritime subjects, and photographs taken in the Tri-City area. The installation functioned as an open visual archive: poetic, associative, and reflective. Rather than offering a closed narrative, it invited viewers to move through fragments, traces, and connections, while considering how perceptions of seas and waters shift over time. Taken together, the residencies and public events in Gdańsk created a rich and layered programme in which water appeared as environment, archive, soundscape, research subject, and embodied experience.
The work of Natalia Revko and Weronika Zalewska demonstrated two distinct but complementary approaches to artistic inquiry: one grounded in listening to the city and its waters in real time, the other in uncovering the emotional and relational dimensions of scientific knowledge. Around them, the Performativity Lab and symposium expanded the conversation, situating individual artistic practices within a broader collective exploration of ecology, urban life, and contemporary cultural imagination.
