It’s high time we talk about the weather
With the rising sea levels, Venice could very well cease to exist within the next century.
It’s thus remarkably haunting and prescient that the Fondazione Prada’s latest exhibition, Everybody Talks About the Weather, explores the urgent reality of climate change through the semantics of weather in visual art. Curated by Dieter Roelstraete, the exhibition features over 50 works by contemporary artists, tracing the various ways in which climate and weather have shaped our histories.
“The project arose from the idea of taking weather as a starting point to highlight the urgency of climate change,” says Miuccia Prada, president of Fondazione Prada. “The goal is to understand the environmental crisis and its undeniable impact on our lives by drawing attention to, representing and analysing meteorological phenomena.”
Spanning both the ground floor and the first floor of the Fondazione Prada’s historic 18th-century palazzo in Venice, the exhibition begins with a large LED wall projecting weather forecasts from traditional and online media sources worldwide. Within the building’s rooms are housed a diverse assortment of artworks, from allegorical paintings to multimedia installations like Pieter Brueghel’s scenographic replica of eight historical masterpieces, or Raqs Media Collective’s underwater film documenting the search for a fragment of an ancient Greek aphorism.
For those with additional time to spare, a series of ‘research stations’ will allow visitors to access a wealth of research by scholars and activists, providing a better understanding of the scientific and cultural issues addressed.
In the spirit of Greta Thunberg, everybody is talking about the weather—and so do we. As the stakes grow higher and the consequences more dire, the real question is: Can we afford not to?
