"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..."
