Tropical Lab 18: Weather

Tropical Lab is an annual international art camp organised by LASALLE College of the Arts for master’s degree and PhD candidates. Led by Senior Fellow Milenko Prvački over two weeks, students from international arts schools and institutions undertake workshops and seminars in Singapore exploring various aspects of history, geography, culture and aesthetics.

About the theme
Weather, as we know it, is a geoscientific term that refers to atmospheric elements to which planetary inhabitants residing on Earth are subjected. Weather is an integral and integrative system that places humans and animals within the ecology of their habitat. Moreover, as a geoscientific condition, weather has a significant existential impact on the environment as the Anthropocene besets the human condition heightened by environmental shifts and crises (Sillitoe, 2021).

Climatic conditions and weathering themes pervade everyday life. From art and poetry to linguistic metaphors to cloud computing, fecund thematic variations remain essential for describing the human condition. In art, the weather remains a source of idyllic and lurid engagement: the outdoors is observed, colours and light are gazed at, while wind, rain and fire are stilled. As artists become deft conquerors of the morphing weather, art history etches a tamed environment subdued by ocular desires.

In contemporary culture, weather becomes a timely indicator of decisions and social practices. In politics, be it ‘fair-weather friends’ or the ‘tide in the affairs of men’, the invocations and incantations remain potent and poignant. While concerns around climate change are at the forefront of contemporary discourse, scholars acknowledge how “profoundly this omnipotent force shapes culture” (Strauss and Orlove, 2020). In more recent times, climate anthropologists have advanced significant theories around the social and embodied dimension of the weathered human body, where “climate change has to be related to global inequality” (Erikson, 2021).

Participating institutions
Budapest Metropolitan University, California Institute of the Arts, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo, Goldsmiths, University of London, Indonesia Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta, LASALLE College of the Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Musashino Art University, Nagoya University of Arts and Sciences, National Taipei University of Education, RMIT, The School of Arts, University of Nova Gorica, Tokyo University of the Arts, University of Art and Design, Cluj-Napoca, University of Arts in Belgrade, University of California, Davis, University of Ljubljana, Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Plymouth, University of Washington and Zurich University of the Arts.

Curator
Hajnalka Somogyi

Image: Tropical Lab 18, 2024 (photography by Ken Cheong)