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Mar 28, 2023

"A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves." --Marcel Proust

A Thousand Words for Weather

"In June 2022, ArtAngel's installation, A Thousand Words for Weather opened at London's Senate House Library. Created by author Jessica J. Lee and sound artist Claudia Molitor, the piece invites listeners to consider the ways in which our experiences of weatherand climate change--are at once intimate, shared, yet untranslatable. Lee began by working with a group of UKbased poets and translators in English, Mandarin, Bengali, Urdu, German, Turkish, French, Spanish, Polish, and Arabic, each of whom contributed ten weather words and their definitions. Each word was then translated into the other languages, forming a thousand-word "dictionary" of the weather. Molitor then translated this dictionary into a sonic landscape, whose playback is controlled by real-time weather data from the UK Metropolitan Office. The installation is housed over three floors of the art deco library in Central London: in echoing stairwells, forgotten trolley storage rooms, amid stacks of books, by windows looking over the city skyline, and in the grand open space of the periodicals room..."