€50,000 grants each awarded to projects based in Portugal, Italy, Finland, and Hungary
TIDAL ArtS today announced the four winning artistic projects and collectives selected for its highly competitive Residency Call, awarding €50,000 grants each to projects based in Portugal, Italy, Finland and Hungary.
The Residency Call attracted over 600 applications, with evaluation teams conducting a rigorous review across four major sea and river basins:
- Atlantic-Arctic Ocean
- Mediterranean Sea
- Baltic-North Sea
- Danube-Black Sea
The four basins are the locations for area-based “Lighthouses” of the European Union’s Restore our Ocean and Waters Mission, considered as living labs for demonstrating, deploying and scaling up solutions. Supported by the European Commission’s Horizon programme, the four residencies will result in lasting artistic works that carry the conversation about marine and freshwater health far beyond the life of this project.
The winning projects were selected for their artistic ambition, community engagement potential and ability to connect local communities to their surrounding waters and ecosystems.
The TIDAL ArtS residencies provide artists with time, space and support to research and develop work in response to the unique landscapes and communities of the host locations. Over the coming months, each artist will undertake a residency that combines artistic production with public engagement, workshops and collaborative activities.
Sarah Tamulski, TIDAL ArtS Project Manager, congratulated the successful applicants, saying the standard of applications made the selection process both challenging and inspiring: “A key component of the TIDAL ArtS Residency Programme is engagement with local communities. Throughout the residencies, artists will host workshops, conversations and participatory activities designed to connect their creative work with local knowledge and experience.”
“The programme aims to create meaningful exchanges between artists and the communities that host them, encouraging collaboration and new perspectives on shared cultural and environmental challenges.”
The Residency Call Winners
The four selected projects, one per Lighthouse location, are:
- Azores Archipelago, São Miguel Island, Portugal – Azores From Below
- Danube River, Ráckeve, Hungary – Huso Huso
- Turku Archipelago, Finland – Living Archive of Water
- Venice Lagoon, Italy – Counterfactual Hydrologies
The Residency Artists
Clara Jo – Residency at Turku Archipelago, Finland – Hosted by CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago
Clara Jo works in film, photography and installation. Their residency project, “Living Archive of Water”, will explore water as a living co-narrator of ecological memory and collective storytelling, drawing on the unique context of the host location. The residency will include opportunities for the public to engage with the artist’s research and creative process.
Sonia Levy, Bint Mbareh & María Montero Sierra – Residency at São Miguel Island, Azores, Portugal – Hosted by Anda&Fala/vaga
Sonia Levy (artist exploring submerged ecologies and the entanglements of power, knowledge, and hydrosocial transformations), Bint Mbareh (artist working with technologies for togetherness through the voice), and María Montero Sierra (curator and art historian focused on art as knowledge production) collaborate on Sub-Atlantic History is Listening to the Azores From Below, a residency project exploring collective voicing and submarine soundscapes to surface submerged histories of resistance in the Azores, with particular attention to how subsea infrastructures reorganise ecologies and power below the sea.
The project begins from the historical and ongoing exploitation of the Azores as a strategic mid-Atlantic node, vulnerable to deep-sea mining and expanding oceanic infrastructures, while also attending to the archipelago’s enduring, collective resistance to ocean injustice. Drawing on submerged acoustics, oral histories, and collective voicing, including participatory methods such as Bint Mbareh’s Choir for Non-Musicians, it unfolds as a call to listen: to bring submerged oceanic worlds into focus and to re-historicise the depths of Azorean seas.
In doing so, it foregrounds an archipelago of resistance in pursuit of ocean justice. The residency will include opportunities for the public to participate in listening sessions, workshops, and sound-based encounters.
Klara Kofen – Residency at Venice Lagoon, Italy – Hosted by TBA21
Klara Kofen is a multidisciplinary artist who has previously presented work at The Guggenheim Museum, New York, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza with TBA21, Nottingham Contemporary, Arts Catalyst, Medialab Matadero, Glasgow International, Centrale Fies and Somerset House.
Her residency project, “Counterfactual Waters”, will explore the present, past and future of the Venice lagoon’s many lives – as ecosystem, colonial archive, industrial body, and climate frontier – through the prism of the computational and epistemological affordances and limitations of the EU’s Digital Twin of the Ocean.
The residency will include opportunities for the public to engage with Klara’s research and creative process.
Adam Hudec, Monika Pascoe Mikyšková (Dusts Institute) – Residency at Danube River/ Ráckeve, Hungary – Hosted by Árpád Múzeum
Adam Hudec is a researcher, artist/architect, and environmental activist working at the intersection of art, spatial research, and natural sciences. He is co-founder of Dusts Institute, a Vienna-based platform exploring environmental sensing, material agency, and participatory practice.
Monika Pascoe Mikyšková is a visual artist. Her work has long been positioned at the intersection of painting, drawing, object, and spatial installation. She systematically develops themes of the relationship between humans and nature, memory, and time, with a particular focus on plant structures, ethnobotany, and material processes.
Their residency project, HUSO HUSO, engages with the Danube’s transformed aquatic ecosystem as both a living environment and a layered cultural archive. It addresses the ecological consequences of industrialisation, dam construction, and river regulation, which have disrupted habitats, oxygen flows, and species migration.
Focusing on the extinction of the beluga sturgeon, once central to the river’s biodiversity and cultural identity, the project reflects on the loss of interconnected ecological and human systems. Drawing on ancient practices, Danube sediments will be processed into natural pigments, each encoding the river’s chemical and environmental conditions.
Historical artefacts from the hosting institution, Árpád Museum, further anchor the work in local traditions and livelihoods once tied to the river.
The project is developed collaboratively with local communities and scientists through workshops in Ráckeve, where participants will create ceramic mosaic tiles by painting with river sediments. Scientific partners contribute ecological analysis, merging research with artistic practice.
The final exhibition will present the outcomes of the research, community workshops, and a sculpture of the sturgeon, symbolising both loss and renewed connection.
Each residency artist or collective will receive a financial grant of €50,000 to develop and deliver their project for a year, engaging local communities in creative activities connected to the Mission’s themes of ocean and water restoration.
The activities and results of each residency project will be presented publicly in their respective region from Spring 2027.
Details to be announced at www.tidalarts.eu and in our newsletter.