Blame it on the weatherman?

by Fabrizio Mifsud Soler.

Banner Image: Marco Cappelletti

Hosted by Fondazione Prada, “Everybody Talks About the Weather” explores the semantics of “weather” in visual art, taking atmospheric conditions as a point of departure to investigate the climate crisis emergency. More than fifty works by contemporary artists and a complementary selection of historical artworks trace the various ways in which climate and weather have shaped our histories and how humanity has dealt with our everyday exposure to meteorological events.

As stated by Miuccia Prada, President of Fondazione Prada, “the project arose from the idea of taking weather as a starting point to highlight the urgency of climate change, empirically equating meteorology and climatology, and using the tools of art and science together. The goal is to understand the environmental crisis and its undeniable impact on our lives by drawing attention to, representing, and analysing meteorological phenomena. Climate is a global issue that influences the actions and destinies of people worldwide. Talking about the weather today therefore means talking and worrying about everyone’s future.”

The exhibition title derives from the slogan “Alle reden vom Wetter. Wir nicht” (“Everybody talks about the weather. We don’t”) reproduced in a poster created in 1968 by the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Student Union) and depicting Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin. As underlined by exhibition curator Dieter Roelstraete, “The message broadcast by the Socialist German Student Union was clear: while other political parties engaged in idle chatter ‘about the weather’, socialists, and leftists more generally, were committed to addressing the issues and questions that really mattered to the men and women in the street. ‘The weather’, in short, was the last thing a true progressive spirit should be caught talking about. Fifty-odd years on, it is hard to imagine a slogan as politically suicidal as this one, so defiantly claiming that ‘we don’t’ – for ‘the weather’ is simply the single most important fact of life everyone is either talking about already, or should really be talking about instead. ‘Everybody is talking about the weather’ – or everybody should be talking about the weather – for the simple reason that the current and ongoing climate crisis may well be the single greatest existential threat humankind has ever had to face in its 100.000-year history – and as such is well on its way to becoming the only thing we ever talk about anymore. For all that, however, climate change remains a subject that is oddly absent, curiously enough, from the broad sweep of mainstream art world attention.”

Morphosis exhibition_ph.Federico_Florian

Fondazione Prada – Everybody Talks About the Weather – Foto Marco Cappelletti 24

Roelstraete seconds the argument of Indian writer and anthropologist Amitav Ghosh, who, in his 2016 book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, exposed the broader failure of contemporary culture to adequately address the threat of climate change as a legitimate source for high-profile content from the perspective of literature. What Ghosh called the cultural world’s “great blindness” is partly due to both the enormity and complexity of our current climatological predicament – the cause of an expansive sense of paralysis among many contemporary authors and artists.

“Everybody Talks About the Weather” develops on two levels, the ground floor and first floor of Ca’ Corner della Regina, host historical and contemporary artworks which reveal artists’ long-standing interest in “talking about the weather”: from allegorical and en plein air paintings to recent multimedia installations and transnational activism. Pictorial works and prints by Old Masters such as Gustave Courbet, Katsushika Hokusai, Plinio Nomellini and Carlo Francesco Nuvolone share space with recent or new works by artists like Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Theaster Gates, and Beate Geissler & Oliver Sann, establishing an ideal continuity between past, present and future or, conversely, triggering a short circuit between opposing visions and discordant notions. Colourful, diaristic pencil drawings by Inuit artist Shuvinai Ashoona are juxtaposed with a photograph by German conceptual art pioneer Hans Haacke. Through their anecdotal descriptions of the phenomenon of evaporation forty years apart, both artists anticipate or openly address the emergency of global warming.

Fondazione Prada – Everybody Talks About the Weather – Foto Marco Cappelletti 16

“Everybody Talks About the Weather” presents an attempt to address broader cultural challenges with the conjoined tools of science and artistic creation: from the evolution of the study of human thought and the changing meanings of bodies in our societies to the current climate crisis. Through these activities, Fondazione Prada intends to disseminate new knowledge and share the latest results of academic and scientific research with a larger audience. It also aims to build connections between distant cultural contexts, point to new trajectories of study, and thus contribute to broadening the perspective with which we examine our present and future cultural tendencies.

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete, “Everybody Talks About the Weather” is open at Fondazione Prada, Venezia until 26 November 2023. It will be complemented by a public program scheduled for October 2023, featuring a series of lectures by international scientists, authors and scholars who will frame the themes explored in the exhibition from a broader perspective.