A Thousand Words for Weather takes place across three floors of London’s most iconic library as a sonic installation born out of a collaboration between writer Jessica J. Lee and seven other London-based poets of different mother-tongues.
Each poet chose and defined ten words for the weather in Arabic, Bengali, English, German, French, Mandarin, Polish, Spanish, Turkish, or Urdu. They then went on to translate one another's chosen weather words or phrases, contributing to a unique multilingual weather ‘dictionary’ that seeks to generate a shared language describing our collective experience of climate and the changing environment while exploring the nuance of meaning in translating and describing our multilingual realities.
These words form a sound piece created by sound artist Claudia Molitor and integrated with a bespoke playback system designed by software architect Peter Chilvers that inputs data from the Met Office, enabling the sound to be altered depending on the weather outside.
