Claudia Molitor

A Thousand Words for Weather

22 June 2022 - 25 March 2023

Jessica J. Lee and Claudia Molitor’s A Thousand Words for Weather is an audio experience that explores the connection between the environment, language, sound and silence. Developed through a collaboration between Artangel and Senate House Library, several listening areas are located across three floors of the library.

Instigated by writer Jessica J. Lee who worked with a group of other UK-based poets of different mother tongues, each choosing and defining ten weather words in Arabic, Bengali, English, German, French, Mandarin, Polish, Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu.

The words where then translated to form a thousand-word multilingual ‘dictionary’, that proposes share language to describe our changing environment while exploring the nuance of meaning in translation. Recordings of the words became the starting point for a series of audio installations made by Claudia Molitor with a bespoke playback system designed by software architect Peter Chilvers that inputs real-time data from the Mat Office, enabling the sound to be determined by the weather outside.

“Above all, there is a soundscape. This is mesmerising and subtle. It hovers in personal headphones, tactfully contained, which are available on every floor of the library. It lingers in the stairwells like internal weather. At 1pm it emits through speakers everywhere: a sonic lunchtime each day.” Laura Cumming in The Guardian

Commissioned and produced by Artangel

Presented in partnership with Senate House Library, University of London