Interviewing Raqs Media Collective

For Cloud Messengers I interviewed Raqs Media Collective, you can read the interview here and below.

Curator Jeanine Griffin interviews Raqs Media Collective as they open their new installation Cloud Messengers at Seed130, London, October 2025.

JG: Cloud Messengers is the third of a trilogy of projects we’ve worked on together exploring the deep entanglement of unquiet water, trade, risk, capital, extreme weather and climate, in London and across the world. This started with The Waves are Rising at the Royal Docks and Thames Barrier Park in 2023, continued with The Tides of our Tears at The Thames Tideway at Richmond earlier this year and culminates now with Cloud Messengers – an exhibition at the epicentre of the UK financial district. How has this context influenced the work? How did the ideas for Cloud Messengers emerge?

Raqs :  The idea for Cloud Messengers emerged in natural progression from The Waves are Rising and The Tides of Our Tears. Naturally, in a sense, like how the hydrological cycle – which we all learn about at school – circulates between the oceans, rivers and other water bodies, and rain-bearing clouds. Having thought about oceans and tides, and rivers and flows, it made sense for us to think continue thinking with water as cloud and rain. 

Also, we have spent many long summer afternoons in Delhi, waiting eagerly for the first rain to come and make the dry earth come alive again. Clouds are messengers; they are auguries of relief. Kalidasa, the Sanskrit poet we read for pleasure, distils this sensibility with great refinement. The passing cloud becomes a messenger carrying a love letter. 

This time, the work is located squarely within London’s financial district – the heart of the speculative engine that animates the financial services, banking and insurance industries. We could say that the work returns the question of ‘stormy weather’ to the turbulent world of capitalism. The insurance industry, for instance, began right around here at Fenchurch Street, in coffee houses where news of shipwrecks and fire, storms and instabilities of all kinds began to be more than just the subject of discussion and rumour and turned into the basis of measures to ‘secure’ capital against unforeseen misfortunes born of inclement weather. Today, the wheel has turned full circle. The increasing use of fossil fuels in the service of an energy-hungry capitalism has also contributed to global warming and sea level rise – making the weather all the more unpredictable. The increasing number of container ships that lose their cargo at sea due to storms makes ‘risk’ a much more volatile entity. So do the cycles of landslides, flash floods and deluges that alternate with forest fires and dry spells that lad to famine. The volatility of the weather is a factor within the logic of climate change that in turn, leads to increasing speculation, which ratchets up the degree of uncertainty — resulting in tsunami like losses for most, and windfall gains for some. Disaster may have terrible outcomes, but it can also be good for business as usual. It is as if Capitalism were itself a cloudburst, always hovering, waiting to break and upturn every forecast and augury. The ‘cloud messenger’ in that instance, takes on a different character. Now, we can never think of clouds otherwise. 

JG : As part of the project we had a fascinating conversation with an actuary and learnt that the formula of risk as “hazard × vulnerability × exposure” was formed in the London coffee houses in this area in the 16th century and refined after the devastating North Sea flood of 1953, but that in the face of climate instability, this formula no longer holds. We are in a ‘stochastic’ system where future risk can’t be predicted on the basis of the past. Those weather events which were relatively predictable – like the monsoon –  are no longer so, with devastating consequences. How does the work explore these ideas and what sources does it draw on?

Raqs : We speak of how the monsoon, once known in India as the ‘constant friend’, is no longer a reliable companion. This means that hazard and risk enter any discussion of the rainy season. There can be either too little, or too much rain; and the degree of rainfall is now part of the unpredictability of the weather that is a consequence of climate change. 

Since the ‘great famine of 1899’ in India, there has been a closely studied relationship between the consequences of the failure to predict the annual commencement and the intensity of the monsoon, and the fortunes or misfortunes of the agricultural economy. Close attention to the factors that influenced the monsoon led to the discovery that the Indian Ocean monsoon was an intrinsic part of a global weather system that included the ‘El Niño Southern Oscillation’. These are fluctuations in the currents of warmth that animate the Southern Pacific Ocean thousands of miles away. This led to an understanding of the relationship between the local unpredictability of the weather and global variation. Over time, and as a result of climate change, these global variations have become more haphazard – more ‘stochastic’ – and this makes the making of long term predictions on the basis of the reading of past phenomena even more risky.

This means that the exposure to risk – of crop failure, of drought, or flood – or damage due to storms in the high seas increases. The insurance trade and the profession of actuaries (which deals in probabilities and predictable patterns) is now upended and partly in a state of ‘random chaos’. This makes ‘speculation’n and gambling on outcomes a lethal, and legal sport. Insurance and Investment (based on the ideas of retrospective recompense and predictive risk-taking) become like the ‘fairground attraction’ of two motorcyclists spinning  precariously around each other like the arms of a whirlwind inside an empty cylinder. This is a work that you will see in the exhibition. It is an image we know well from childhood in Delhi, and for us now an evocative image of the chaos of unpredictability.

JG :  As part of the research for this exhibition we found lots of intriguing connections – one was that Edmund Halley of comet fame was also involved in early actuarial science. This confluence of the cosmic and capital, of natural forces intersecting with systems of control seems to run through your work, is it something that continues to hold your interest?

Raqs : We are always joining dots. It is not just Edmund Halley and the comet and actuarial tables. Once you enter this particular rabbit hole, you realise that the periodicity of Halley’s Comet, which is 75 years, is also the length of time now viewed increasingly as an ‘actuarial standard’ – meaning a measure of a normal life. This kind of serendipity seems to cast spells. And traditional forecasting methods did involve looking up at the stars to try and read celestial phenomena as indicators of terrestrial outcomes. 

But the probability of ‘space weather’ affecting conditions on earth is no longer just the preserve of astrologers. 2025 is supposed to be a year of intense solar activity due to heightened solar flare events. While this will certainly impact electromagnetic phenomena, including communication with satellites that are crucial to navigation (and can lead to chaos on highways and the high seas), there is also the intriguing possibility of disruptions in atmospheric phenomena, especially wind patterns. Some insurance companies are already beginning to factor for ‘extreme space weather’ even though data on variations and predictable patterns are scarce at present. But the cosmos is beginning to influence the way we think about the weather, and not just in an astrological sense. 

JG : Clouds are nebulous natural forms but we also have the digital cloud that stores all our data (including our messages..), which although seemingly intangible is based on carbon-heavy server farms and huge water-use. Does the title for the exhibition draw on this dual meaning?

Raqs : Of course it does.

The ‘cloud’ of data is run on data farms that use air conditioning to cool down, which means they emit heat and of course burn carbon. In the long term that affects not just the weather, but also climate. The key is to be able to communicate this paradox. About heat and cooling, and the heat produced by cooling. And the need to ‘cool’ information that may be too ‘hot’ to handle otherwise. A cloud is a study in achieving a balance between condensation and precipitation, until it rains. 

A cloud may be nebulous, but it is not insubstantial. A cloud can be as heavy as a thousand kilograms. And yet it floats, because of the way in which air currents circulate around it. This is an interesting image – a delicate balance between the weight (gravity) of what is being said, and the levity (buoyancy) of how it is being communicated. 

This leads us to think about the rhetoric, the forms of presentation, of complex ideas. How to make data as heavy as a cloud feel as if it were as light as a cloud. That is why we are artists, not meteorologists, although it may feel otherwise sometimes. 

JG : You work in so many media – this is an installation encompassing video, print, sound, text, performance and you also often work in sculpture- how do you determine which ideas are manifested in which media?

Raqs : We like to think of our work as a conversation, sometimes a cacophony, sometimes a thoughtful, measured exchange of thoughts and signals. Different ideas get parsed on different surfaces of meaning and affect. And then they are exchanged and translated. What began as a sound can become an image, what was once a text can become a number, and a quantity can achieve quality and texture. Words become things become pictures that become unspeakable silences. This is how we have always worked. In medias res. In the middle of things, of everything. 

JG : What do you see as the primary risks facing us in 2025?

Raqs : We risk an aphasia in decoding what cloud messengers are saying. This means not being able to smell the wind for rain, or becoming needles on broken barometers, present but incapable of reading variation. It means that the signs are clear, but we are unwilling or unable to read them, or to understand what we read. 

An interview by Jeanine Griffin with Raqs Media Collective, 2025.

Find out more about the exhibition