International cultural programme for water and climate action
Cultural institutions worldwide are invited to join Flying Rivers—a distributed climate action initiative centred on water. Participation requires no prescribed format or scale: it builds on each institution’s existing programme, communities, collections, site and capacities.
Created by artist Bill Balaskas and developed in collaboration with the Global Commission on the Economics of Water (GCEW) and Anna Dupont, co-curator of GCEW follow-up initiatives, Flying Rivers is a cultural response to the Commission’s pivotal final report, The Economics of Water: Valuing the Hydrological Cycle as a Global Common Good, published in October 2024. Foregrounding water as a vital natural resource alongside the human right to safe water and sanitation, the report advances a radical proposition: the hydrological cycle must be recognised and governed as a “global common good.”
As the report concludes, there can be no adequate response to climate change without urgent, holistic action on water. ‘Blue’ water in rivers, lakes, glaciers and aquifers and ‘green’ water held in soil and vegetation interact continuously with the oceans and the atmosphere through evaporation, atmospheric transport and precipitation, together forming a single interdependent planetary cycle. Flying Rivers takes its name from this cycle and its invisible flows of water vapour that connect distant regions.
The final paragraph of the GCEW’s report makes a crucial acknowledgement: facts and scientific evidence can inform narratives, but “culture is the ultimate medium” through which those narratives are formed and disseminated. In Climate Change and Culture (2026), GCEW Co-Chair Mariana Mazzucato similarly positions arts and culture as essential social infrastructure for shaping collective imagination and building public legitimacy for a just transition. Reflecting this understanding, Flying Rivers seeks to make the hydrological cycle publicly legible and foster cultural imaginaries and collective norms needed to value and protect water. It aims to build pressure for political action and help educate a new generation capable of sustaining long-term change.
Flying Rivers was announced and developed in 2025 through a sequence of three events presented in the official public programme of the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, beginning on World Environment Day (June 5) and culminating during the Biennale’s finissage week (November 19), when BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art was announced as the programme’s first collaborating institution.
Following the events in Venice and further international consultation with cultural practitioners and institutions, Flying Rivers now aims to bring together a critical mass of partners committed to sustained and coordinated action that challenges greenwashing and the political and economic forces driving the water crisis.
Support and collaboration
Participating institutions will receive a visual communication toolkit—including posters, digital banners, artwork tags and projections—as well as a wide range of learning resources. These materials can be adapted to their own programmes, audiences and contexts.
The programme will also facilitate exchanges with scientists, activists and researchers to inform the development of public, educational, curatorial and site-specific responses that address water-related issues and support efforts to protect the hydrological cycle.
Participating institutions will also be invited to shape a new framework for climate action through the Flying Rivers International Museums Consortium. Rather than adopting a predetermined model, the Consortium will develop shared principles through collective work in the months and years ahead. A central ambition is to formulate an International Water Pledge for the cultural sector, co-authored by participating institutions, scientists, artists, researchers and activists.
Flying Rivers welcomes institutions across all geographies, scales and models: museums and galleries of contemporary, modern, medieval and ancient art; organisations dedicated to archaeology, architecture, design, film, photography, natural history and science; interdisciplinary and discipline-specific, collecting and non-collecting institutions; heritage sites, archives, libraries, cultural centres, foundations, biennials, community-led and artist-run spaces—and other institutional forms not named here.
Expressions of interest
Please use the Flying Rivers contact form or email info@flyingrivers.art to send a brief introduction to your institution, its location and, if you wish, any initial thoughts about participation. Expressions of interest are considered on an ongoing basis.
