Hotel Kittiwake+, United Kingdom

Our participatory project ‘Hotel Kittiwake+’ is based in Lowestoft, UK, where artificial nesting towers, called ‘Kittiwake Hotels’, have been installed as compensatory nesting sites for seabird populations affected by wind farm development. These ‘hotels’ have been built by energy companies as a condition for developing offshore wind farms further out in the North Sea. Until they choose somewhere new, Kittiwakes tend to return to previously successful nesting sites, nesting on rooftops, signage, and along the seafront.

Appearing clearly on the horizon, the hotels reveal the dynamics of the North Sea as a site of infrastructural and biological meeting, where certain areas might be approved for industry in return for ecological compensation elsewhere. Taking these intriguing, architecturally distinct eco-structures as a conceptual foundation, our project invites people to collectively reimagine what a ‘hotel’ for marine life could be when framed by oceanic thinking.

Throughout early 2026, we will invite participants including East Anglian community members such as hotel staff, artists, marine scientists, and energy engineers to take part in a series of role-playing workshops. We use role-playing as a creative method for thinking across species boundaries; during the workshops, participants will inhabit the perspectives of marine entities and built phenomena. These might include kittiwakes, sand eels, sonar pulses, turbine blades, kelp forests, glacial sediment, harbour porpoises, fishing trawlers, and underwater cabling. Participants will work together, through human, more than human, and even inanimate perspectives, to collaboratively construct a shared marine hotel that reflects their interconnections and mutual dependencies.

Each workshop will be informed by the use of locally acquired marine data, and through technologies used to sense the ocean from an information-based approach, such as buoys and Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs). These real time measurements, which might include wave data and underwater noise, will allow us to explore how collective, non-extractive narrative making can occur with ocean monitoring information. Together with insights into local habitats and food chains, as well as site visits to Kittiwake Hotels, they will anchor speculative thinking in real marine conditions.

The workshops will build on each other to contribute to the imagined hotel’s evolving form, as participants shape its functions, layout, and meaning in response to the roles they inhabit. These sessions will balance the biological needs of each guest against the collective, offering a process that is reflective, collaborative, and open-ended.

These workshops will produce drawings, plans, audio material, and sculptural elements that will inform and be reflected in an artwork to be presented publicly in June 2026 – a new take on a Lowestoft Kittiwake Hotel. Initially being constructed as a site- responsive, modular sculpture, the structure will hold both narratives and ecological information. We then intend to develop the structure beyond this iteration into an exhibition context, continuing to invite reflection on marine coexistence, biodiversity, and restoration.

Goals

we hope to create a playful, participatory space for imagining marine coexistence in Lowestoft and the wider North Sea, re-evaluating structures that appear daily on the horizon to better engage with oceanic health, and to develop artwork that continues those conversations in wider contexts.