What Does a Disappearing Coastline Actually Look Like From the Inside?
Not the aerial drone shot after a storm, the version you only get by standing in a harbor town and talking to the people who've watched their sea wall lose a little more ground every winter. Rising water and eroding coastlines are usually reported as statistics. They're lived as something much slower and more specific: a flooded basement, a fishing season that starts later than it used to, a street that floods every spring now instead of every decade.
That's the gap a new open call for artists is built around, not illustrating climate change in general, but spending real time in four coastal cities and working out what's actually changing there, with the people who live it.
Five Cities, One Project
Turning the Tide is a Creative Europe co-funded project bringing together partners from five countries; Intercult (Sweden), ARTIT (Greece), Wiener Bildungsakademie (Austria), DEAR HUNTER (Netherlands), and the Urban Culture Institute (Poland), and in collaboration Fablevision Scotland and the River//Cities network. Between 2024 and 2026, the project is placing artists in residence across coastal cities to research, respond to, and make work about how communities are already adapting to a changing coastline.
What the Residencies Actually Involve
This isn't a studio grant with a vague brief. Each residency gives an artist dedicated time in one city to do cultural mapping, talk to residents, and research how that specific place is responding to erosion, flooding, or shifting industries tied to the water. Local Urban Labs, shorter field visits built into the programme, add more direct contact with the community outside the residency city itself.
The artwork comes out of that research, not ahead of it. Each artist is expected to produce a piece that reflects what they actually found, and the full set of work from across the four cities will be brought together in an online exhibition at the end of the programme.
Who Can Apply
The call is open to artists at any stage of their career, with a preference for people already working in ecological or socially engaged practice, but nobody needs a climate-science background to apply. What matters more is a willingness to spend real time somewhere before making anything about it.
Art won't stop a sea wall from eroding. What it can do is put a face and a place on a story that usually stays abstract until it isn't and that's worth doing regardless of how the tide eventually turns.
This open call is part of Turning the Tide, co-funded by the European Union under the Creative Europe programme, supporting artists working across coastal European cities on climate adaptation and community engagement.
If this sounds like your kind of research, the full call and application details are on the Turning the Tide website.
