Cloud Messengers is the final chapter in a trilogy by Raqs Media Collective, which I curated for Invisible Dust, exploring the deep entanglement of unquiet water, trade, risk, and human emotion: in London and across the world. The journey began with The Waves are Rising at the Royal Docks and Thames Barrier Park in 2023, continued with The Tides of Our Tears at Richmond’s Thames Tideway in June 2025, and now culminates in the heart of London’s financial district at Seed130, from 15 Oct – 29 Nov 2025.
Cloud Messengers traces the invisible threads that bind natural forces to systems of capital and control in a time of climate crisis, through a new performance and installation at Seed130 in the City of London.
At the core of Cloud Messengers is a provocative question: how do we perceive risk in an age of uncertainty? The formula of risk as “hazard × vulnerability × exposure” took shape near the site of this work, in the coffee houses of 17th-century London — key sites of social and commercial exchange where the maritime insurance industry emerged — and later refined after the devastating North Sea flood of 1953. But today, in the face of planetary instability, these measures falter. Raqs Media Collective challenge us to rethink what it means to predict anything, when the only constant is change.
Read the interview I did with Raqs in the next post.
And a review of the exhibition by Scale magazine is here.
Jeanine Griffin 
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