How to Talk to the Weather Demons

Water, Weather, and Climate

BWA Wrocław
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Submission
ASP Katowice
Language
English
Source
Public Organisation
Format
Website Content
Era
Recent: 2000+
Sphere
Cultural
Environmental
Submission
ASP Katowice
Language
English
Source
Public Organisation
Format
Website Content
Era
Recent: 2000+
Sphere
Cultural
Environmental

The exhibition How to Talk to the Weather Demons offers a sophisticated exploration of how Slavic mythological frameworks can provide meaningful perspectives on contemporary environmental challenges. By focusing on weather demons known as "płanetnicy," who traditionally governed atmospheric conditions in Slavic folklore, the exhibition creates conceptual bridges between pre-modern understanding of environmental forces and current climate concerns, demonstrating how mythological thinking continues to offer valuable frameworks for addressing complex contemporary issues.

The exhibition's emphasis on humanity's growing urgency to understand and control nature reflects how environmental crises prompt renewed engagement with fundamental questions about human relationship to natural systems. By connecting contemporary concerns about flooding, droughts, and weather anomalies to traditional mythological frameworks, the exhibition demonstrates how ancient storytelling patterns continue to provide meaningful structures for conceptualising human-environment relationships even in ostensibly scientific contexts.

Water's centrality to the exhibition—positioned simultaneously as vital life source and threatened common resource—creates powerful symbolic focus that connects abstract environmental concerns to immediate human experience. This dual framing exemplifies how effective contemporary mythology often identifies specific elements that can function simultaneously as literal necessities and powerful metaphors, creating points of connection between abstract global challenges and concrete local experiences.

By framing environmental degradation as problem requiring "collective, respectful approach to nature," the exhibition aligns with traditional mythological understanding of natural forces as entities requiring proper relationship rather than mere resources for exploitation. This reframing exemplifies how ancient mythological perspectives can provide alternative conceptual frameworks for addressing contemporary challenges, offering correctives to dominant paradigms that have contributed to current environmental crises. The exhibition thus demonstrates how mythological thinking continues to evolve to address changing circumstances while maintaining connection to established patterns of understanding human relationship to natural forces.

𝌇 READ: "How to Talk to the Weather Demons", BWA Wrocław.

↑ ▢ "Jak rozmawiać z płanetnikami / How to Talk to the Weather Demons", 2024. Exhibition poster; Artists: Centrala (Małgorzata Kuciewicz & Simone de Iacobis), Kornelia Dzikowska, Marta Krześlak, Diana Lelonek, Cecylia Malik / Siostry Rzeki, Alicja Patanowska, Agnieszka Mastalerz & Michał Szaranowicz; Curator: Joanna Glinkowska; Source: BWA Wrocław.