Lecture: Reading the Clouds

Clouds are constantly changing, shaping our skies, influencing the climate, and inspiring both scientific inquiry and the imagination. For centuries, people have watched them with curiosity, seeking to understand what they reveal, and what they conceal. Yet clouds remain elusive, shifting and vanishing without warning.

Bringing together literature, art and science, “Reading the Clouds” invites the audience to explore these familiar yet elusive phenomena from three complementary perspectives. How does literature give form to their instability? And how can artists transform atmospheric data into sensory experience? How do scientists observe atmospheric phenomena?

Through accessible talks, the audience will discover clouds as places where knowledge meets uncertainty, and where observation opens the door to wonder.

The event will be held in English.

Admission is free with registration.

However much, or little, you know about clouds and other atmospheric phenomena, come and see them differently. And perhaps look up at the sky on your way out.

Speakers

Anouchka Vasak is a senior lecturer in French literature at the University of Poitiers and a specialist in eighteenth-century literature. Her research explores the connections between literature, meteorology, climate history, perception and sensibility. She co-directs the Perception du climat research network at the École normale supérieure (ENS-PSL), as well as the MétéoS series published by Hermann. Her publications include Luke Howard, Sur les modifications des nuages, her French translation and scholarly edition of Luke Howard’s On the Modifications of Clouds (Hermann, 2012), Météorologies. Discours sur le ciel et le climat, des Lumières au romantisme (Champion, 2007), Maupertuis en Laponie, co-authored with Finnish mathematician and historian Osmo Pekonen (Hermann, 2014), and Le lieu du bleu. Enquête sur un ciel de Provence (Anamosa, 2026).

At Reading the Clouds, taking the history of cloud classification as a starting point, she will explore how literature gives form to clouds, the sky and atmospheric instability.

Josefina Nelimarkka is a Finnish interdisciplinary artist based between Helsinki and Paris. Her research-based practice explores air, weather and possible climate futures through multisensory installations combining light, glass, moving image, sound and real-time environmental data. Working with climate scientists and technologists, including researchers at the University of Helsinki, she approaches clouds as both physical phenomena and expressions of uncertainty, transformation and perception. Her recent projects include The Cloud of Un/knowing at Amos Rex in Helsinki (2024), Futurs Horizons at the Finnish Institute in Paris (2024), and The Cloud Hour at COP30 in Brazil (2025). She received the Nordea Art Prize in 2024.

At Reading the Clouds, she will explore how atmospheric data and installation art can transform the way we perceive and experience atmospheric phenomena.