Mr. Eliasson explains “The Weather Project” in Bergsonian language: “I wanted a subject that implied `community’ and that was open-ended. Predicting weather is one way we collectively try to avoid the unforeseeable, which our lives are always about. The weather is a subject about which a community may also permit a high degree of disagreement: I can say `I hate the rain,’ you say, `I love it,’ and you may still think I am a nice guy.
“I’m not interested in weather as a matter of science,” he continues. “I’m not a meteorologist or a botanist. I’m interested in people: how people engage sensually with the qualities of weather — rain, mist, ice, snow, humidity — so that through their engagement they may understand how much of our lives are cultural constructions. We have a desire to assume that certain things, like our reactions to the weather, are natural, but they are in fact cultural, and the end result of this can be entrenched ideologies, which we take to be inevitable. This is the path toward totalitarianism.”
He rethinks that remark after a moment. “I shouldn’t have insisted that everything is cultural and not natural, because that is as dogmatic as the reverse. I should have said that the line separating nature and culture changes through history, and this is what we should be aware of.”
Mr. Eliasson cites the ubiquity of white walls in art galleries: “Chalk is white and chalk was used as a disinfectant and so early modernists decided on white walls as symbols of purification, clean spaces. But if chalk had been yellow maybe all our galleries would be yellow today, and we would interpret yellow as a neutral color.”
Hemos hablado ya varias veces de The Weather Project. Con motivo del cese de esta instalaci