Culture and Climate Change – Event Archive 2009

But now the weather has become the climate, a frightening, anonymous physical quantity which can lead to catastrophic events at any time. Climate change has turned weather into storm. Climate is weather without poetry or esthetics. Unlike weather, the climate has no aura.

What used to be common property has now become the domain of engineers, scientists, even politicians. Normal mortals – who just a moment ago were enjoying the freshness of the dew and a gentle breeze during a stroll in the park – now experience the weather as a mess of CO2, CFCs and soot particles. They have to be meteorologists to calculate future rainfall, farmers to compare the energy yields of rapeseed and sugar cane, car mechanics to use biodiesel correctly, economists to steer the worldwide flow of goods, zoologists to make sure the zoos keep polar bears in a way that is appropriate to the species – and soldiers to wage wars over raw materials.

An explorer who wanted to visit the North Pole in the middle of an Arctic summer would have to swim the last few kilometers. Even the experts were astounded last August when an icebreaker discovered open sea at the Pole.

A hundred years after the futurist opera "Victory over the Sun," featuring Kazimir Malevich's epoch-making "Black Square" as part of the stage design, what must be feared today is the victory of the Sun over its little planet Earth. And if the Russian avant-garde saw in Malevich's modern icon a never-failing energy field which would initiate the transformation of the world via boundless technological progress, we now seem to be heading for a precipice.

Changes in the climate, whether caused by man or nature, always go hand in hand with cultural changes. Our attitude toward ourselves and to others also changes when the climate changes. The body and the senses are exposed to new experiences.

Heat is a category like color, sex or intoxication, indeed like art itself. Heat makes us lose our sense of so-called reality and forces us to return to our own body, which has always been our most reliable thermometer. Heat forces even time to change its inexorable rhythm; it elapses less perceptibly, more viscously, less measurably.

Climatic phenomena, which are being increasingly medialized, therefore need to be "reculturalized" by measuring the aesthetic temperatures of a new feeling for life. However, the kind of esthetic treatment of weather and landscape we are proposing could possibly contribute more to preserving both than a purely scientific approach.

Whereas the climate is prone to abrupt changes, disasters even, philosophically speaking the weather is a constant, timeless category. In the Latin languages – as in the Portuguese word "tempo" or the Spanish "tiempo" – atmosphere, i.e. sunshine and rain, and time in the chronological sense have even entered into a happy symbiosis. Here, every question about the weather always implies a notion of time. German and English, however, make a distinction between "time" and "weather." The latter comes from Old High German wetar = wind.

No wonder the weather, and not the climate, has always inspired artists and poets, because weather is mood and spirituality. Rilke spoke of "blond, old warmth". In recent decades environmentalists have never tired of telling us what we must not do. The artists will now offer us a vision of what we can do.

In all these cases, the issue is not scientific analysis, but an esthetic approach seeking to draw attention to the interdependence of nature and human activity in a form that can be experienced by our senses. The critical mass of art is well-suited to setting awareness processes in motion among the public.

Frozen time

Part of the exhibition deals with the Antarctic, whose natural cycles are certainly very closely interwoven with our own, and its fragile ecosystem reacts sensitively even to disturbances caused in other areas of the world. It functions as the Earth's "measuring instrument". The icy ground of this mythical region resembles an enormous archive in which the climatic history of the Earth is stored. The Antarctic is frozen time.

Although affected by the environmental sins committed by the rest of the world, the southern continent is largely still in a state of sublime innocence. It is the land before the Fall, perhaps the final great promise to mankind since the Tropics lost some of their paradisiacal beauty.

This zero point of culture is well suited for intellectual and artistic reflections on the world: emptiness, silence and seclusion, but also purity, clarity, peace and spirituality are some the existential categories that will be discussed in the transcendental Antarctic. The artists begin where the scientists and their measurements cannot reach, thus allowing a new and fresh perspective on this neuralgic point of the Earth.

The artists will also have to come to terms with the color white, which was regarded by the impressionists as a noncolor, yet in the eyes of Kandinsky was an "insurmountable, indestructible, almost infinite cold wall," a silence that can suddenly be understood. "It is a void that is juvenile or, more precisely, a void that is before the beginning, before birth" (Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art).

And just as the "white cube" of the modern art galleries, in its complete neutrality, mercilessly reveals the weaknesses of a work of art, so the naked, white expanse of the Antarctic exposes the inadequacies of human activity.

Tempest brings together the following artists: Laura Vinci (Brazil), Erika Blumenfeld (USA), Michael Sailstorfer and Jürgen Heinert (Germany), Lutz Fritsch (Germany), Kalle Laar (Germany), Reynold Reynolds (USA), Shin Kiwoun (Corea), Alexander Nikolaev (Uzbekistan), Simon Faithfull (UK), George Osodi (Nigeria), Guido van der Werve (The Netherlands), Marcellvs L. (Brazil), Raquel Lejtreger (Uruguay), Juliana Rosales (Uruguay).

Curator: Alfons Hug
Curatorial Assistance: Paz Guevara

It goes without saying that the exhibition based on video-installations is climate-neutral. Alfons Hug