In response to the global climate emergency, Icelandic Art Center has joined 27 arts organisations across the world to form the World Weather Network, a ground-breaking constellation of ‘weather stations’ located across the world in oceans, deserts, mountains, farmland, rainforests, observatories, lighthouses and cities.
For one year starting on 21 June 2022, artists and writers will share ‘weather reports’ in the form of observations, stories, images and imaginings about their local weather and our shared climate, creating an archipelago of voices and viewpoints on a new global platform.
Iceland’s weather station will be located in the Snæfellsnes peninsula. As the resident in Vatnasafn / Library of Water, Einar Falur Ingólfsson will record a yearlong visual weather-diary, created in “discussion” with weather records made at the site 170 years ago. Einar Falur will mainly be working with photography, but also text, video and sound.
Offering different ways of looking at, listening to, and living with the weather, writers and artists’ weather reports will be shared on the World Weather Network platform from each location: the Himalayas, the Mesopotamian Marshes in Iraq and the desert of the Arabian peninsula; the Great Salt Lake in Utah and the ‘Great Ocean of Kiwa’ in the South Pacific; ‘iceberg alley’ off the coast of Newfoundland, the waters of the Baltic Sea and the Arctic Circle; a tropical rainforest in Guyana and farmland in Ijebu in Nigeria. Artists and writers are working in observatories in Kanagawa in Japan and Manila in the Philippines; looking at cloud data in China and lichens in France; lighthouses on the coast of Peru, the Basque Country and the Snæfellsness peninsula in Iceland; and cities including Dhaka, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London and Seoul.
Climate scientists, environmentalists and communities will participate in a wide-ranging programme of special events held in each location and online through the platform. Through the course of the year, the London Review of Books is commissioning special reports from writers based in many of the locations in the World Weather Network.
Whilst each organisation is reporting on their local weather, every one of these ‘weather stations’ is connected by the over-heating of the world’s atmosphere. The World Weather Network presents alternative ways of responding to the world’s weather and climate, and is an invitation to look, listen, learn and act. To learn more, visit the World Weather Network platform: www.worldweathernetwork.org
