Frieze
The 58th Venice Biennale’s beach opera
We have been warned. As I write, another report heralds catastrophe: this time, a UN global assessment reveals the threat to humanity, as one million species are now at risk of extinction. And yet the experience of climate change stretches so far across time and space; the eco-philosopher Timothy Morton describes it as a ‘hyper-object’, such that human consciousness struggles to fully comprehend it. Its vastness goes some way towards explaining the apathy that accompanies the coming apocalypse. Rather than continue to create stories out of climate change’s cataclysmic local events – disappearing ice and rising oceans, extreme storms and droughts – can we also think of how it is woven into the fabric of our ordinary, everyday lives?