Dear Climate
2014 - ongoing
Posters, podcasts, letters
Core Collaborators: Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer, Marina Zurkow
Web Development: Sarah Rothberg
Sound Design: Pejk
Malinovski
Typography: Nancy Nowacek
Voice Overs: Eliza Foss, Seth Kanor, Jane Cramer
Supported by NYU Visual Arts Initiative Awards
Project website: dearclimate.net
DESCRIPTION
Dear Climate is exploring new modes of address through the creation of a collection of ”inner
climate” tools. These tools—posters, audio meditations and letters—are designed to nudge participants
toward new relations with the greater-than-human world. The free, downloadable posters use the language of
agit-prop and a “fast read” to create a jolt of relational suggestion. Alternately, the podcasts
explicitly leverage the guided meditation model, creating a quiet internal space in which to encounter new
narratives, poems and speculations about the climate, our “dear climate.”
The old joke—“Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about
it”—isn’t so funny anymore. Lots of people are trying to do something about the weather. Climate
change is on the geopolitical agenda, if only in time for us to realize that it’s too late to do
anything meaningful. Maybe the problem’s not that no one’s been doing anything about the
weather, but that we’ve been talking about it in the wrong way: the old “let’s fix
it” way. Now that the weather’s changed, is it also time to change the way we talk about
it?
We began Dear Climate by looking for a new way to talk about the weather. We wanted a different
vocabulary from the one we were hearing from the “survival community”: instead of crisis and
catastrophe, we wanted the familiar and ordinary; instead of desperation and heroism, playfulness and
friendliness. Instead of imagining mass movements or calling for community action, we were interested in
finding a more personal relationship to climate change. Remembering the Sixties slogan, “the personal
is political,” we wondered if the politics of climate change had evaded the personal for too long?
Of course we were well aware of the emphasis on personal responsibility in the environmental
movement—the injunctions to practice simplicity, recycle paper and plastic, avoid waste, and reduce
consumption. But what about deeper realms of the personal, like pleasure, fantasy, fear, desire,
sensation, vision, imagination?
PRESS / WRITING:
