Trying to catch the wind may seem a futile task, but inside the Bora museum in the Italian city of Trieste there is proof that it can be done, as long as you have the right container. On the shelves of the crammed exhibition space, you can find an offshore breeze from Barcelona in a perfume decanter, a Bohemian downwind in a mustard jar, an angry mistral in a plastic water bottle and a humid Swiss föhn in a test tube.
Pride of place is taken by a vintage year of the wind that gives the museum its name, captured in a metal paint-sample tin: a bora from February 1954, when cold gusts dive-bombed from the karst hills into the Adriatic sea at a record speed of 171 kilometres an hour.
The collection of 400 bottled winds is museum director Rino Lombardi’s lifetime project: a practical joke he came up with more than 25 years ago and kept going until it turned into an accidental work of art, a monument to an invisible force that has shaped the landscape and culture of the continent but is rarely put centre stage. “In Trieste, the wind is not just a wind – it’s an institution,” says Lombardi.
His collection started with donations of bric-a-brac from local people: the cheese grater that someone’s uncle attached to his boots as crampons during the bora season; a newspaper used to windproof a jacket; the iron that a mother put in her daughter’s coat so she wouldn’t be blown away.
As his museum grew, Lombardi also incorporated artworks inspired by the gale which the French writer Stendhal bemoaned as the “abominable bora”: Roberto Pastrovicchio’s photographs of broken umbrellas, paintings of local folk buffeted by the breeze, kites, pinwheels, whirligigs. “The wind is the soul of our town,” Lombardi says. “It’s our history and memories, our literature and art, but it’s also always new. It brings new ideas.”
This year, Lombardi has secured backing from the Italian culture ministry and the EU’s post-pandemic Next Generation funds, enabling him to expand his little museum across Trieste and the surrounding hillside. An interactive outdoor museum where adults and children can explore the mysteries of wind that hits the region over the winter months, the “Borarium”, is due to open in spring 2024.
If the Bora museum is attracting new attention, it is because our relationship with wind is changing. The Industrial Revolution promised to liberate humanity from its reliance on the elements: people could cross oceans on steamboats that didn’t rely on favourable wind conditions, and work or read at night when the sun did not shine. But as countries across the world scale up renewables and Europe’s energy security relies on blowy conditions over the North Sea, the tables are once again turning.
On the other side of the Alps, Vienna-based artist Karin Fisslthaler has been collecting footage of gusts and gales from old films such as Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz, John Ford’s The Hurricane and Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala. For her short film I Can Feel It Coming, commissioned for a wind-themed group show at Vienna’s Kunst Haus last year, she stitched together snippets from each film into a billowing patchwork screen.
“I was fascinated by the fact that wind only becomes visible through other media,” she says. “You can’t photograph air in movement, but on film you can capture the leaves or flying hats or kites that it animates.”
During her research, Fisslthaler discovered that wind on film often functioned as a cipher for forces beyond human control: in Czech director Gustav Machatý’s romance drama Ecstasy (1933), a curtain blowing in the breeze symbolises star Hedy Lamarr’s sexual desire for a young construction worker.
“The wind has several different qualities, which are sometimes opposites: it can be tender but it can also be destructive. Because it is outside our control, wind can make us fearful, but giving up control can also be a liberating experience.”
Fisslthaler retains artistic control over her films, but in John Grzinich’s sound installations, it’s the wind that is in charge. For almost 20 years, the Estonia-based American artist has perfected building harps whose strings are plucked by movements of air. Also known as Aeolian harps, after the Greek god of wind Aeolus, string instruments played by the wind were once an obsession of artists of the Romantic period, cited in poems by Coleridge and Shelley and painted by JMW Turner.
During the pandemic, when noise pollution from planes and cars went down to a minimum and many people found the time to listen to nature, Grzinich says his wind harp project struck a chord once more. Over the past three years, he has been commissioned to install semi-permanent wind harps in northern Estonia, Amsterdam, Leuven in Belgium, Braga in Portugal and Monheim am Rhein in western Germany. His latest was unveiled at the Sequences art festival in Reykjavik, Iceland, last week.
Unlike the Romantics, Grzinich does not seek to find traces of himself in nature. He deliberately doesn’t tune his harps to a musical scale, saying he is more interested in the wind’s own “aeolian effects”. “I have this curiosity about whether we can tune into the wind, or give it a voice,” he says. “What can the wind tell us?”
Wind is air that is brought into motion because the sun heats the Earth unevenly, creating variations in air pressure in our atmosphere. As the globe’s poles are heating up faster than the equator due to the climate crisis, these differences are becoming smaller, and some scientific models project a 2%-10% drop in average offshore wind speeds over the coming decades.
But Grzinich’s harps don’t need heavy gusts. His instruments are made of long Chinese nylon strings sold as fishing lines, which resonate at the touch of a light breeze as well as during gales. “Some of the best sounds come when there are only very gentle currents, which are simply the even hot and cold air inversions you have around sunrise and sunset,” he says. “The strings like stable air movements.”
On a long stretch of beach north of The Hague, the wind doesn’t just sing as it blows across the sand dunes and whips up the North Sea, but dances. From mid-July to late September, when the beach is empty, the weather dry and the wind blows steadily from south-west to north-east, Dutch artist Theo Jansen takes his kinetic structures for a walk. Or, more accurately, they take themselves for a walk.
With skeletons of lightweight yellow PVC tubing held together by cord-tie sinews, Jansen’s strandbeest (“beach animals”) look like giant insects. When the wind catches in their Dacron sails, their movement across the firm golden sand is an elegant crab-walk rather than a jerky robot shuffle.
A physicist by training, Jansen has spent more than three decades perfecting his creatures’ pneumatic propulsion system. On his website, he charts their evolution across 12 periods and more than 50 species: from the virtual, worm-like Vermiculus Atramentum of the 1986-89 “Pregluton” period, via the wobbly-legged Currens Vulgaris, to the 2020-2021 Volantum period, when Jansen’s creatures learned to fly six metres above the beach sand.
Wind, Jansen says, is “the element to which I have somehow dedicated my entire life”, and of all the wind artists working in Europe, he is the one who manages to capture the imagination like no other. His “beach sessions” draw hundreds of visitors from across the continent, and the beasts are regular viral fodder on TikTok, Facebook and YouTube.
During last year’s energy crisis, he recalls over the phone, his strandbeest became more than just self-contained artworks: they were walking adverts for the wind, illustrating the potential joys of a renewable future. “The war has made us realise how reliant our economies were on gas,” he says. “Wind energy seems to me the perfect way to create energy in a more self-sufficient way, and I think it is impossible for us to neglect it as a source of energy.”
From the beach he can see a row of offshore turbines on the horizon, but he is aware that onshore windfarms can meet fierce resistance from local people. “What should go hand-in-hand with expanding windfarms is a leap of perspective: we need to feel a deeper connection with nature again. My animals seem to give people a sense of that connection, because they seem to be alive.”
Jansen says his utopian goal is to build beach-walkers that no longer need his supervision and can shuffle along the North Sea coast without his guiding hand. This year, he has experimented with strandbeest that walk as a group, seemingly holding on to each other as they tread the sand. “They still look quite vulnerable,” he says of the prototypes he has christened Animaris Rex. “I don’t think they would survive a storm.”
But he will keep going. “I have always been quite good at skipping over the setbacks. I am an irrational optimist at heart, and I think humanity needs a bit of that to tackle climate change. If you focus too much on the reality now, you get depressed. You have to keep walking.”
