Biography

Founded in 2012 by Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer, and Marina Zurkow, DEAR CLIMATE is an ongoing creative-research project that hacks the aesthetics of instructional signage and the techniques of meditation to lead viewers and listeners towards a better informed, more realistic, and more affectionate relationship to the more-than-human world, including geo-physical forces, and other species. Using surprise and humor, their projects are at once playful and deeply serious. Their work has been shown internationally including at Putting Green (Brooklyn), Storm King Arts Center (NY), MU (Eindhoven), and Science Gallery (Dublin). Currently active members are Una Chaudhuri and Marina Zurkow.

DEAR CLIMATE (2012-2024)

DEAR CLIMATE’s posters employ an agit-prop activist style. Playful and absurd, they highlight the need to think through multiple scales and connections at once. Can the Substrate Speak? extends a key question of postcolonial studies – “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Gayatri Spivak) – to planetary politics. This is an invitation to open the mind’s eye to the blind spots that enable modernity’s destructive extractivism, but it is also – and more importantly – an invitation to open the mind’s ear to humankind’s ancient and essential dialogue with the lithosphere, the soil and stone from which we build our worlds. In this poster series, DEAR CLIMATE’s program of “speculative biophilia” tunes into the wisdom and wonders embedded within and below the surfaces of our lives.