A Thousand Words for Weather

Artangel will present a specially commissioned sound installation at  London’s iconic Senate House Library featuring thousands of words for  the weather in ten languages commonly spoken across the city. Opening on  23 June 2022, A Thousand Words for Weather is the first project to launch as part of a ground-breaking new alliance of artists and writers called the World Weather Network, initiated by Artangel and 28 cultural organisations around the world.Throughout three floors of Senate House Library, which is part of the  University of London, visitors will experience the sound of the weather  as it responds to live data from the Met Office.A collaboration with writer Jessica J Lee and sound artist Claudia Molitor, A Thousand Words for Weather offers  a new multilingual ‘dictionary’ of words with their definitions to  explore the role of translation and generate a shared language to  describe our changing experience of climate and the environment.To create the dictionary, Jessica J Lee worked with seven other  UK-based poets to translate ten words for the weather into ten languages  including Arabic, Bengali, English, German, French, Mandarin, Polish,  Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu. The poets and translators who helped create  the dictionary include Izdihar Alodhami, Nikhat Hoque with the Bengali  British Poetry Collective, Leo Boix, Iris Colomb, Marta Dziurosz, Nina  Mingya Powles and Ayça Turkoglu.