Excerpt:
Around the globe, artists are reckoning with climate change and finding new ways to render the impacts of rising seas legible.
Such is the scale of the climate crisis, and the devastation it is wreaking, that it can be challenging to comprehend. How to bring the centuries of damage we have done, and are doing, to our planet to life, when effects like sea level rise may not be explicitly visible in real time?
“Quite often on the news you’ll see these graphs showing sea level rise and flooding levels, and it can be quite hard to grasp the magnitude of it all,” says architect Andre Kong. “With something that devastating, how can you understand what it actually looks like and what it actually means?
“It got me thinking about how relaying that information with an actual physical object could create a much more meaningful and memorable experience. An experience that might force people to sit down, reflect, and maybe even act.”
Kong is one of several architects, designers, and artists who have taken on the challenge of bringing visibility to the climate crisis through their work. While their projects vary in scale, location and typology—from benches to abstract art installations, light shows, and even typefaces—they all share a common purpose: to warn, to inform, to evoke feeling, and, most of all, to make us realize what we stand to lose by doing nothing…
