From 29 July to 2 August, Sommerwerft, Frankfurt’s International Theatre Festival on the River, marked its 25th anniversary with Blue Lab, a five-day ocean literacy programme under the motto “The Ocean Starts… in Frankfurt!”. The riverbank became a space for exhibitions, performances, workshops and public debate on rivers, coasts and oceans.
Blue Lab’s own framing is a journey from source to sea, from the Main and the Rhine to the North Sea. Its core message: protecting the ocean does not start at the coast. It starts in rivers, including one running through a city that has never seen the sea.
TIDAL ArtS at Blue Lab: three works on the Baltic and North Sea
Three works at Blue Lab came from TIDAL ArtS, the Horizon Europe project SUBMARINER coordinates to connect art, community and marine science across four of Europe’s sea regions.
Echoes of the Deep, by Neonature, is a VR installation. Visitors put on a headset and stand inside two futures for the Baltic Sea: one damaged by ghost nets and pollution, one recovering.
Fish in a Kettle, by the Lab Rats Collective, is an immersive theatre performance set at a party hosted by the ocean itself in the year 2050, exploring coastal futures and climate change through ritual, grief and absurdity.
North Sea Signal Flags, led by artist Isabella Martin, invited festival visitors to design a new maritime signal flag for a body of water worth marking, continuing a series first made with children in Wells-next-the-Sea.
David Whyte, who represents TIDAL ArtS on the Blue Lab steering committee, also used the festival to test a social inclusion framework assessing how diverse an audience events like this actually reach.
Why ocean literacy in Frankfurt matters for the Baltic & North Sea
SUBMARINER coordinates the EU Mission Ocean Lighthouse for the Baltic and North Sea. Our work sits mostly in aquaculture, spatial planning and blue economy policy, fields that rarely bring us to a theatre festival. But eutrophication, one of Baltic Sea’s defining environmental problem, is a river problem before it is a sea problem. Most of the people whose water ends up in the Baltic will never stand beside it.
Blue Lab makes that same point about the Main and the North Sea, through art rather than data. It is also why TIDAL ArtS exists: to bring ocean literacy to people upstream, in rooms that ocean policy conferences do not reach!
Ocean literacy resources from SUBMARINER
Have a look at our ocean literacy repository, and get to know TIDAL ArtS. Blue Lab reached an audience we rarely do: a free festival crowd who came for theatre and left having stood, for a few minutes, inside a future for a sea they had never thought much about.
Blue Lab is an officially recognised Decade Action of the UN Ocean Decade (2021–2030), coordinated by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC/UNESCO), and is part of the EU Mission “Restore our Ocean and Waters” Charter. Blue Lab is led by protagon e.V. and Escuna Criativa e.V., a Salvador da Bahia based organisation connecting traditional shipbuilding culture with art, education and social engagement.
