Where It All Began: A Throwback to the First Round of the Artists’ Residencies and Local Urban Labs
From the shores of a Greek island scarred by wildfire, to the canals of Gdańsk, the innovation districts of Vienna, and the waterways of Stockholm: Turning the Tide’s first Local Urban Labs were nothing short of extraordinary.
Summer 2024. Across four very different European cities, something remarkable was quietly taking shape. Artists were wading into rivers, listening to communities, stretching whale sculptures into public squares, and asking hard questions about what water and its future, really means to us. This was the first round of Local Urban Labs and local residencies (LUL Round I) and looking back now, it’s clear these early labs set the tone for everything that followed: bold, participatory, urgently alive.
Let’s take a trip back through all four locations and celebrate the artists, organisations, and communities who made it happen.
Evoia, Greece — Art Born from Fire and Resilience
Greece’s second-largest island has suffered relentlessly in recent years, with wildfires having scorched over 15% of its land, while fierce storms and extreme weather have left communities and ecosystems deeply wounded. It’s precisely this fragile, resilient reality that made Evoia such a compelling location for Round I. Curated by Artit, two artists were selected through an open call: Giorgos Gerontides and Christina Maridaki, two practices, two distinct lenses, one shared commitment to bearing witness and sparking hope. The process was guided by a digital workshop with Dr Spyros Bofylatos (Royal College of Art / European Academy of Design) and included a meeting with Mayor Ioannis Kontzias on local recovery efforts.
Giorgos turned his camera toward the grassroots networks holding North Evoia together in his documentary Vulnerable Nets, profiling organisations like the Stagones Social Cooperative, the AMAL Social Cooperative Enterprise, the Forest Voice movement, the Forest Firefighters’ Voluntary Association, and the Sideritis Collective, all co-created with local teenagers and young adults. Christina took a more intimate eco-feminist path: over 11 days in the thermal springs town of Edipsos, she immersed herself in women’s lives around the legendary healing waters, producing Feminsularity, a documentary and zine weaving together mythology, community identity, and quiet collective strength. Together, their works refuse to let Evoia’s story fade.
Vienna, Austria — Sustainability Made Tangible in Seestadt
Vienna’s first Local Urban Lab, implemented by the Wiener Bildungsakademie, landed in Seestadt Aspern, one of Europe’s most ambitious urban development areas, a district rising almost from scratch on the city’s eastern edge. The guiding question: How can art make sustainability visible, relatable, and part of everyday life? Anny Wass answered by bringing a whale into the neighbourhood, a striking visual and performative symbol connecting global ecological crises with a local community’s lived reality. At the Seestadt street festival, her work became an irresistible entry point into conversations about climate and ocean ecosystems that people might otherwise have walked straight past.
Paul Kitzmüller took a different but equally resonant approach with The Individual in the Diversity, large-scale works assembled from thousands of hand-drawn figures, each one representing a person, yet each only meaningful as part of a whole. During public exhibitions organised by the Wiener Bildungsakademie, children searched the dense crowd of figures for ones that looked like themselves, a quietly powerful connection between personal identity and collective responsibility. Both works were later presented at the Turning the Tide International Lab in October 2024, where Vienna’s local practice found its place in a broader European conversation.
Gdańsk, Poland — Listening to the Waters
Between May and August 2024, Gdańsk became a site of intensive artistic research and experimentation. Two artists, Natalia Revko and Weronika Zalewska, undertook a three-month residency through the Urban Culture Institute, working alongside international artists Robyn Woolston, Katarzyna Piórek, and Eva Andronikidou. Natalia’s project Water of Interest was a live sound-streaming performance in which audiences experienced a real-time transmission of sounds recorded as she moved through the bastion areas of Dolne Miasto, rivers, canals, and coastal zones rendered as a living, historically layered soundscape. Weronika set out to make an experimental film with scientists from the Institute of Oceanography at the University of Gdańsk, but when obstacles arose, she transformed her approach entirely: what emerged was a series of intimate interviews with researchers about their emotional relationships with the organisms they study, their bodily experiences at sea, and what it means to be a woman within scientific institutions, woven together with archival footage into something genuinely poetic.
The Lab also came alive in its public moments. The Performativity Lab on 18 May brought together sound installations by Zorka Wollny and Krzysztof “Arszyn” Topolski, culminating in the third performance of Manifesto of Hydrosexuality by cyber_nymphs, Ewelina Jarosz and Justyna Górowska, an immersive, queer, postmedia work staged at the Urban Culture Institute that proposed radical new ways of imagining the Blue Planet. On the symposium day, Weronika also unveiled notatki umoczone, a poetic open archive of Baltic flora illustrations, encyclopedic entries, and photographs, an invitation to wander through fragments and let perception shift slowly. Gdańsk Round I was layered, multifaceted, and full of surprises.
Stockholm, Sweden — The Future of the Water We Drink
Stockholm’s first Local Urban Lab zeroed in on something urgent: Lake Mälaren, the city’s primary freshwater source, and what its future holds as climate change accelerates. The showcase took place during the city’s iconic Kulturfestivalen in August 2024, curated by Elisavet Papageorgiou and produced by Intercult. Ongoing Realities opened things up with Mälarmaran – Scouting Future Fish at Vattentorget near Slussen on 16 August, a performance blending dance with dark humour to explore a scenario where clean water in Lake Mälaren might run out within 80 years, inviting audiences into a satirical dystopia where humans might one day need to grow gills to survive. Equal parts funny and unsettling, it landed exactly as intended.
At Norrbro/Strömparterren, Tina Eskilsson presented Vikten av vatten (The Importance of Water), large water drops suspended on strings that reflected the surrounding world upside down, a visual metaphor for how climate change could invert everything we take for granted. Throughout the day, visitors were invited to fill and hang their own drops, turning the installation into a growing collective artwork. Simple, beautiful, and deeply felt, Stockholm Round I proved that art staged within a major popular festival isn’t a compromise. It’s an opportunity to reach the people who haven’t yet been reached.
A Beginning Worth Celebrating
Looking across all four of these first Local Urban Labs, what’s most striking is both the diversity and the coherence. In Evoia, art honoured communities weathering ecological disaster. In Vienna, it brought global environmental concepts into the fabric of a new neighbourhood. In Gdańsk, it listened to water, to scientists, to the city itself. In Stockholm, it stood in a summer festival crowd and asked: what will you do when the water runs out?
Different cities, different artists, different communities, but all animated by the same belief that art has a real role to play in how we understand and respond to the climate crisis. Turning the Tide, with its network of partners including Artit, the Wiener Bildungsakademie, the Urban Culture Institute Gdańsk, and Intercult, built something in that first round that was genuinely worth building: an international platform where local stories matter, where artists are trusted to lead, and where the urgency of our ecological moment is met with creativity, care, and community.
Here’s to Round I and to everything it sparked.
