Introduction

During their four-week residency on Evia as part of Turning the Tide in 2025, artists Coleman & Hodges explored questions of climate crisis through engagement with local communities, landscapes and histories. Their works, The Six Bowls and Campfire Tales, emerged from a process of listening, participation and site-specific research. By combining interactivity, storytelling and speculative approaches, they sought to create open-ended structures that foreground local voices while addressing global environmental and social concerns.

The following Q&A from Artit (Athens) reflects on their experience, the choices shaping their work and the ongoing life of these projects beyond Evia.

1. Turning the Tide Labs brought together artists, researchers, institutions, and
local contexts around questions of climate, water, and social transformation.
What initially drew you to this project, and what questions were you carrying with you when you entered the lab?

Our work and interests resonate very strongly with the themes of the Turning the Tide Lab. The residency on Evia offered us an opportunity to immerse ourselves in an environment that, while very different from our home in South West Scotland, shared striking similarities; forested landscapes, rural communities, low population density, and land-based employment. Both places are also experiencing the impacts of climate change, including wildfires and flooding.

We entered the lab with a curiosity about how the climate crisis is understood and articulated within differing local contexts. What social tensions existed (or perhaps didn’t) around climate and how were they expressed in public and political space? 

We were also interested in how the effects of a changing climate were interpreted: did people on the island connect local environmental events to global processes, or were they framed in other ways?

Q2. What aspects of the lab framework shaped your process most – its time
constraints, the local context, the themes, the conversations, or something
else? What did that structure make possible (or difficult) for your practice?

Time constraints are always a factor in projects like this, as are questions of language. However, one of the most complex challenges was geographical. We were based in the city of Chalkida, while the villages that had experienced the most severe climate impacts were located in remote, hard-to-reach rural areas. Although some meetings with organisations working in those regions were facilitated, sustained engagement required independent travel. With no feasible public transport options, we eventually managed to navigate these difficulties by hiring a vehicle in order to continue meaningful research.

During our time in Chalkida, we developed strong relationships with active community groups in the city. People were incredibly welcoming, inviting us to talks, seed-saving events and initiatives aimed at activating public space. Through these exchanges, as well as through our conversations with villagers, we gained insight into local attitudes toward government-led, top-down carbon reduction strategies, which remain highly controversial on the island.

The logistical conditions directly shaped the development of The Six Bowls and Campfire Tales. The physical distance between city and rural communities heightened our awareness of how knowledge circulates – and sometimes fails to circulate – across landscapes. The Six Bowls emerged in part from thinking about containment, scarcity, and distribution: how resources such as water are held, shared, or withheld, and how ecological crisis is experienced unevenly. Meanwhile, Campfire Tales grew from the informal conversations we were able to have – in bars, at public gatherings, and in open spaces – where storytelling became a way of navigating contested narratives around climate responsibility and governance.

The challenges around travel inevitably limited the depth and breadth of our engagement however overall, the project framework was open and flexible, which we appreciated. The structure of Dear Hunter arriving ahead of the artists to conduct initial research was well conceived. The conversations and knowledge-sharing sessions with the Dear Hunter team were particularly valuable, providing context and grounding for our own investigations.

Q3. Turning the Tide Labs invited artists to work with complex issues such as
climate change, extractivism, and care. How did these themes influence the
choices you made in developing your work, whether conceptually, materially,
or methodologically?

The themes of the Turning the Tide Lab – climate change, extractivism and care – are already central to our practice. However, our approach is fundamentally place-specific. Rather than imposing a predetermined framework, we allow context, relationships and lived experience to shape both the conceptual and material development of the work. Themes and methodologies emerge through the site itself.

Our practice and process is based in looking and listening. We try to remain open to contradiction, to complexity and to perspectives that may challenge our own assumptions. In Evia, this openness allowed us to focus on how villagers articulated their experiences of environmental change, loss and resilience. We became responsive to stories, gestures, domestic and communal spaces and the landscape itself.

This influenced not only the conceptual framing of The Six Bowls and Campfire Tales, but also our methodology. Rather than positioning ourselves as commentators, we sought ways of creating space for shared narratives to surface. Questions of extractivism and care became intertwined, not only in relation to land and resources, but also in relation to knowledge. How do you engage without extracting? How do you hold stories responsibly? How can artistic form become a method for collective reflection rather than a definitive statement?

In this sense, the themes did not dictate the work; they were embedded within the process of listening, responding and making.

Q4. To what extent did the specific local context of the lab shape the work you
developed? How do you navigate the balance between responding to a particular place and addressing broader, systemic concerns?

All of our work begins in a local context. The Six Bowls and Campfire Tales were developed directly in response to what we encountered on Evia; its landscapes, its communities and the specific tensions surrounding climate impact and governance on the island.

When we are in the process of making, we don’t begin by asking whether the work will translate beyond the immediate locale. Our focus is on responding with integrity to what is present; to the conversations we are part of, the materials available and the histories embedded in the place. We are very aware of the broader systemic context and in the links to local, however this connection tends to emerge organically rather than by design.

That said, the two works that resulted from this project function almost as adaptable technologies. They are frameworks or vessels that can be reconfigured to engage with other contexts while retaining the core questions they hold. The systemic concerns; climate change, extractivism, care and governance are not unique to Evia, even though they manifest differently there.

We are currently reconfiguring the works to operate within a local Scottish context. In doing so, the balance shifts again; the structure remains, but the stories, materials and priorities change. For us, this movement between places reveals how deeply interconnected local experiences are with broader, systemic conditions.

Q5. Do you see the work you developed during the lab as a conclusion, a fragment,
or a starting point? How do you imagine it continuing or transforming beyond the timeframe of the project?

Although we (almost!) concluded the work during our time on Evia, its nature resists being a fixed endpoint. The works function less as conclusions and more as starting points, frameworks that can activate new conversations and actions in different contexts.

The Six Bowls in particular operates as a structure that can be re-sited and re-voiced. While it emerged from the specific environmental and social realities of Evia, it is designed to hold new narratives. At present, we are beginning a new iteration of The Six Bowls in Scotland, exploring local issues that are deeply connected to global conditions – climate pressures, land use, governance, and care.

In this way, the project continues to transform. Each iteration carries traces of the previous one, yet is reshaped by the people, landscapes, and urgencies of the new place. Rather than a finished statement, we see the work as an evolving process, one that remains open to dialogue, adaptation and collective processes.

Q6. Looking back on the process, has your understanding of your role as an artists
shifted in any way through your participation in Turning the Tide Labs?

Because of the nature of our practice, we wouldn’t say that our understanding of the role of the artist has fundamentally changed, but it has certainly deepened.

While both Evia and our part of Scotland share some aspects of climate breakdown, the context in Evia feels much sharper. The public conversation around environmental change is highly charged, shaped by complex historical, cultural, and geographical factors. The sense of loss and anger there is palpable, and at times startling in its immediacy.

Participating in Turning the Tide reinforced for us that the artist’s role can sometimes be that of a conduit or channel. In one instance, our position within an international project enabled us to support a local photographer whose work powerfully captured the rupture between her life and her landscape following environmental devastation. She was left carrying these images and the experience with little opportunity to move them outward. Through our engagement, and through the wider Turning the Tide platform, she was able to present her work publicly within the lab’s context. That visibility allowed her to speak to a wider audience and, in some measure, to find a degree of release or closure. Moments like that deepen our understanding of artistic practice not as authorship alone, but as facilitation, witnessing and care.

Q7. Your collaborative practice brings together research, participation, and
speculative thinking within public contexts. How does working as a duo shape
your approach to authorship, decision-making, and responsibility when
engaging with complex ecological and social systems?

Working within a shared practice is endlessly interesting. We come from very different aesthetic positions, with distinct interests and sympathies, but we share a strong sense of purpose. Individual authorship or ego is not a driving force for us, it genuinely doesn’t matter who does what. Instead, the work evolves through conversation and shared insight. Our differences generate productive tensions, and it is within those exchanges that ideas are tested, reshaped and refined.

Collaboration also provides a useful distance from the work as it develops. Because there are two of us, neither becomes entirely submerged in a single perspective. That distance can be crucial when making decisions, particularly when engaging with complex ecological and social systems where ethical responsibility matters.

We are both drawn to systems, to the intricate and often hidden relationships that connect people, land, governance and history. Working as a duo allows us to dig into that complexity together, following paths of shared curiosity. It becomes a process of joint discovery, continuous dialogue, experimentation and reflection.

Through this process, we begin to move toward new ideas. These emerge through exchange and responsibility is held jointly. So collaboration is not simply a method of working; it is integral to how we think and how we respond within the systems we are exploring.

Q8. In Six Bowls: Ecologies of Resistance, elemental materials and sensory
encounters are framed through multiple possible “uses,” from planning tools to oracles. What does this open-ended structure allow participants to do or imagine that a more fixed narrative might not?

Six Bowls: Ecologies of Resistance draws on site-specific materials to create a space for dialogue and reflection in response to ecological crisis. Six elemental substances; air, honey, silt, stone, water, and burnt wood are each held within a bowl, forming both an installation and an invitation. Participants begin by selecting from nine possible “uses” for the bowls, then choose one element to engage with more deeply. Guided through an interactive exploration, they explore elements of a landscape that has been shaped by wildfires and floods, extractive economies and inequality as well as ideas around resilience, resistance and futures thinking.

Rather than delivering a single narrative, an open-ended structure creates a framework within which multiple narratives can coexist with many different journeys through the work. Participants are not positioned as audience members, but as active participants. As they navigate through multiple pathways, each person makes choices and receives and responds. This kind of participatory artwork that invites imaginative engagement can help restore a sense of agency. We aim for the experience to resonate at a deep and lasting level.

As we develop the “uses” of Six Bowls: Ecologies of Resistance for new contexts, we expect that the ‘uses’ not to be prescribed by us, but to be generated and activated by the community. Our role is to act as guides and collaborators rather than authors of fixed meaning. This approach allows hyper-local stories, needs and new forms of imagining to surface and be communicated.

The process of collectively generating the content and functions of the Six Bowls is, in many ways, the work itself. It invites participants to speculate about their futures, to mine their pasts and to articulate new insights about where they live. Through this shared activity, people can explore what kinds of futures might emerge or be demanded.

We think of the Six Bowls as a form of “technology”, a simple but adaptable structure capable of holding new voices, ideas and stories in different places. It comes from understandings of place, but equally concerned with creating space for dialogue and for the possibility of change.

9. Both Six Bowls and Campfire Tales create spaces for gathering, dialogue, and
shared reflection in landscapes marked by extraction or environmental crisis.
How do you think about participation and collective imagination as forms ofresilience or resistance in these contexts?

We see collective action, shared understanding, and collective imagination as vital to how communities of any size cope with and adapt to a rapidly changing world. Change is real, it’s ongoing and will be felt everywhere. In that context, nurturing new ways of working and imagining together becomes essential.

Participation is not simply a method of engagement for us, it’s a form of resilience. When people gather to reflect, to tell stories and to imagine futures collectively, they begin to rebuild agency. In landscapes marked by extraction or environmental crisis, where power often feels distant or imposed, creating spaces for shared experience and reflection can counter isolation and fragmentation.

Collective imagination can also function as resistance. It offers an alternative to dominant narratives shaped by capitalism and extractivism, which tend to prioritise competition, ownership and depletion. Through projects like The Six Bowls and Campfire Tales, we try to explore methodologies rooted in sharing stories, networking and collaboration, all practices that foreground care and interdependence rather than exploitation.

We believe artists can and should play a role in developing and supporting these methodologies as facilitators who create structures within which new forms of dialogue, solidarity and possibility can emerge.

10. How do you think about audience and reception in relation to this work? Who
do you imagine encountering it, and in what ways, directly or
indirectly, might it resonate beyond the immediate context in which it was produced?

We are interested in developing strategies to share ideas beyond the gallery context. Most of our work offers ways in which audiences can actively participate in public space. While the ideas explored may be complex or challenging, encountering them should be simple, non-threatening, and engaging. We aim to blur the boundaries between audience and participant by sharing authorship and creating a space for collaborative creativity. Both works produced during the Evia residency aim to embody these principles.

Six Bowls: Ecologies of Resistance is, by design, adaptable to different contexts. It can be reactivated in new places by people with distinct concerns, fears and dreams. It functions as an active creative space, capable of holding the experiences and imagination of a group of participants across a variety of settings whether in a rural village, a public gathering or a government policy meeting.

Campfire Tales is composed of six individual bundles of kindling, each intended to light a fire in a different place and to spark a conversation alongside it. The wood has been carefully scavenged from sites scarred by the devastating wildfires that swept across the island. Accompanying each bundle is a provocation, drawn from a key issue encountered during the residency. The work forms a portable catalyst for dialogue, intended to invite reflection and exchange, potentially at the close of the Turning the Tide project.

Both works are accessible to a broad range of audiences: individual citizens, community groups, campaigning organisations, planning departments and policy makers. The intention is to create work that resonates beyond its immediate context, opening possibilities for dialogue, reflection and collective action wherever they travel.

Conclusion

We hope that our residency demonstrates the potential of art to navigate complex ecological and social systems through collaboration, dialogue and imaginative engagement. The Six Bowls and Campfire Tales are evolving works, designed to travel, adapt and generate conversations in new contexts. Through participatory approaches, local stories and collective reflection, we hope that our work demonstrates creative ways of exploring resilience, resistance and shared understanding in the face of climate change and environmental crisis.