Coastlines in Europe and its former colonies are being treated as living laboratories where performing arts methods probe the intersection of ecological collapse and cultural crisis. This matters because coastal zones face a double threat: climate-driven inundation and erosion, and political tensions as national borders harden to control migration. Existing approaches to resilience often overlook the cultural and historical dimensions of how communities experience and respond to these pressures. CoastARTS fills that gap by retrieving neglected ecological knowledge from Indigenous and other marginalised groups, and by using theatre, performance, and exhibition-making to understand how coasts have been sites of disembarkation, invasion, and contestation across centuries. If successful, the project will produce a book on deploying performing arts methods across other disciplines, alongside co-created performances, exhibitions, and sustainable digital resources accessible to all. The work unfolds in Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Norway, and the UK. It does not aim to engineer a direct practical fix—no new flood defences or border policies—but to build a deeper, cross-cultural understanding of how human and multispecies communities can adapt to planetary change. That understanding could, over time, inform how policymakers, planners, and citizens imagine and shape resilient futures.
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CoastARTS treats the coastal areas of Europe and its former colonies as zones for analysing the convergence of ecological and cultural perspectives on crisis. The project uses performing arts research to develop methods and models that can be deployed across multiple disciplines to deepen understanding of the intricate links between historical crises and looming threats to the Earth. It thus lays ground for building resilience in communities and fostering adaptive responses to planetary change. The archival and practice-led research of CoastARTS explores transhistorical, cross-cultural and transregional links to better understand what is life-giving in human and multispecies communities. A key aim is to retrieve neglected ecological knowledge from Indigenous and other marginalised communities. Working with museums, festivals, arts centres and theatre-makers, we will develop exciting new approaches to understand how coasts act, and interact, as crisis zones in iconic and material terms. We ask how these spaces – as sites of disembarkation, inundation, invasion, erosion, division and contestation – can inform the imaginary construction of crises past, present and future. We view coastlines as sites threatened by the climate and biodiversity crisis and by political contestation and discrimination as national borders are asserted to control migration flows into Europe. CoastARTS is a comparative, multi-sited study proceeding in three phases (research and creative design, community-based practice, reflection and analysis), each lasting a year. It will produce new research, notably a book on how performing arts methods can be deployed in other disciplines. With cultural partners, we will co-create performances, exhibitions and sustainable digital resources that will be accessible to all. The work unfolds collaboratively in Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Norway and the UK, and serves as both an analytical window into coastal crises and a mode of collaborative action.
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