To the elements!
My Ariel, chick,
That is thy charge: then to the elements
Be free, and fare thou well!
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Heat is a category like color, sex or intoxication, indeed like art itself. Heat makes us lose our sense of so-called reality and forces us to return to our own body, which has always been our most reliable thermometer.
As American anthropologist Michael Taussig reported from Colombia¡¯s Pacific coast, heat is a ¡®dream and a drug¡¯, all in one. It is hardly surprising, then, that Bronislaw Malinowski, the father of anthropology, was only able to bear the murderous heat of New Guinea in the realm of the Argonauts of the Western Pacific with generous doses of morphine.
Perhaps it was fear of this threatening disintegration of all discipline and order that
moved the founder of the state of Singapore to combat the searing heat of the
equator using the means of air conditioning. Lee Kuan Yew is even supposed to havepersonally measured and adjusted the positions of the trees and the length of the
shadows they cast ¨C to prevent the city park from becoming unduly hot.
In Walter Benjamin¡¯s story ¡°In the Sun,¡± which he wrote on Ibiza in 1932, the author
describes the noonday heat of the Mediterranean island as follows:
¡°The traveler is already too tired to reflect, and as he loses control of his feet, he
notices that his imagination has freed itself from him. The sun scorches his back. The
air is heavy with resin and thyme, and he believes they will suffocate him as he
struggles for breath¡±.
The traveler in Benjamin¡¯s portrayal of Arcadia no longer sees, but feels. After the
heliophilia comes the heat stroke.
Heat forces even time to change its inexorable rhythm; it elapses less perceptibly,
more viscously, less measurably.
The beads of perspiration on the skin of Brazil¡¯s samba dancers give us a foretaste of what the world can expect from climate change: inexorably advancing Tropics with parched throats and feverish sensuality.
An explorer who wanted to visit the North Pole in the middle of the Arctic summer
would have to swim the last few kilometers. Even the experts were astounded last
August when an icebreaker discovered open sea at the Pole.
With ever increasing urgency, the issue of climate change has been attracting
worldwide attention in recent years. The consequences for human beings and nature are already incalculable. The melting of the polar icecaps and mountain glaciers,
and the resultant disappearance of natural reservoirs of fresh water; the increasing
frequency of destructive hurricanes and typhoons; rising sea levels and the gradual sinking of entire island groups and low-lying populated areas; the grave threat to biodiversity in both the northern and southern hemispheres, these are only a few of the dramatically developing consequences of climate change. They will affect the Inuits in Alaska just as much as the Caboclos of Amazonia, the refugees in Sudan and the inhabitants of the rich Netherlands. We used to be able to make demands on our planet Earth; now it is the other way round. The alarm bells are ringing.
The fact that international conferences are taking place more and more frequently (the most recent one was the World Climate Conference in Bali in December 2007) shows that politicians are now taking the issue seriously, too. It is becoming clear that climate change is more than an ecological problem. It will affect all aspects of human life. And nobody can pretend to be unaware of the problem since Al Gore's award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."
All we need to know about climate change, in terms of science, has been said. However, the issue raises not only political, economic and social questions, but also cultural ones. The exhibition aims to "culturalize" climatic phenomena by measuring the "esthetic temperature" of the conditio humana. The exhibition raises the question how human beings have dealt with the imponderables of the climate and the environment over the centuries, how they have adapted, and which survival strategies they have developed.
Organized by the Goethe Institut, Brazil
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