Climatology & Climatography of Care
Visual Histories and Global Futures
The team includes Dr. Sria Chatterjee, Dr. Jamie Allen and Karolina Sobecka from the Max-Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut, and the Critical Media Lab at the FHNW, Basel and Prof. Dr. Stefan Brönnimann from the Institute of Geography of the University of Bern. Within the framework of the residency they will work together for the first time in this constellation.
The proposed project is interested in histories and futures of climatology and climatography, not simply as a scientific trajectories and disciplines, but as a means of knowledge production that relates to colonial enterprises. Climate change not only causes social inequality, but the ways in which we measure, visualize and communicate climate data could better encompass complex regional differences, modes of care and social implications of climate sciences. The perspective of climatology as a discipline that is entrenched in economic and political spheres, extends the existing research at the Institute of Geography with their work in historical climatology, recomposing weather and climate over the past ca. 400 years, as well their research into a combination of early instrumental data, proxies and climate models, climate dynamics and large-scale variability and climate and society interactions.
Using collected historical imagery, from select international archives, the team will produce research writings on the themes of ‘climate data empathy’, colonialism, climate and public health and also seek to produce media-topological profiles of language, data and imagery. Considering the impetuses, geographies and local practices of gathering and measuring climate “data”, climate epistemologies will be mapped in light of their links to human and non-human health, welfare and situated ways of life.
The project centers around a series of semi-public, workshop-encounters between the team members, developing modes for the visualization and historical context and climatological knowledge.
A prospective outcome of the Climatology & Climatography of Care project creates work for exhibition, using newly developed techniques, and expanding on the residency theme of Global In/Justice.

Dr. Sria Chatterjee is postdoctoral fellow based at the 4A Lab program of the Max-Planck Kunsthistorsiches Institut in Berlin, and works with the Cycles of Circulation project at the Critical Media Lab Basel. She holds a PhD from Princeton University and was awarded the Charlotte Elizabeth Proctor Prize for her dissertation. She specializes in the political ecologies of art and design in the Global South and her work draws on transnational environmental histories, the history of science - in particular plant science, agriculture and climatology, landscape studies, design and cybernetics. She is currently Contributing Editor at British Art Studies and her work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Contemporary Political Theory, Cultural Politics among others.

Dr. Jamie Allen is occupied with what media and technologies teach us about who we are as individuals, cultures and societies. Born in Canada, he has been an electronics engineer, a polymer chemist and an exhibition designer. He likes to make things with his head and hands — experiments into the material systems of media, electricity, and information as artworks, events, and writing. He lives in Europe, works on arts and research projects, writes a fair amount, and tries to engage himself with and create prefigurative institutions that are generous and collaborative, acknowledging that friendship, passion and love are central to aesthetic, research and knowledge practices. He is a Senior Researcher at the Critical Media Lab Basel. (www.jamieallen.com)

Karolina Sobecka is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of art, science and technology, arranging and participating in social configurations that channel, accommodate or resist technological shifts. Karolina’s current projects explore notions of ecology and governance through case studies in the fields of climate- and carbon- engineering. She is currently a PhD candidate at ECAM European Center for Art, Design and Media based Research Basel, and Kunstuniversität Linz.

Prof. Dr. Stefan Brönnimann heads the group for climatology at the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern. He and his group also belong to the Oeschger Centre for Climate Research. They process historical atmospheric data from the last centuries and use them to create three-dimensional data sets that reach further back than the start of modern measurement series. With these data sets, they analyse large-scale climatic variations and extremes.