Cloud Messengers, Raqs Media Collective
Exhibition: 15 October – 2 December 2025
Seed130, Fenchurch Street, City of London, EC3M 5LY
Raqs Media Collective collaborated with Invisible Dust to draw speculative philosophical connections between monsoon rains, floods, financial markets, and actuarial science.
Cloud Messengers traced the invisible threads that bind natural forces to systems of capital and control in a time of climate crisis, through a performance and installation at Seed130 in the heart of the City of London.
What is not constant can no longer be a friend.
Raqs Media Collective
Part of Invisible Dust’s ‘Forecast India’ programme, the work explored the shifting nature of risk in a world where the old maps no longer hold: rainfall patterns, river flows, and sea levels defy historical precedent, leaving us without a stable basis to predict the future.
At the core of Cloud Messengers was 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.
What does it mean to predict anything, when the only constant is change?
Cloud Messengers was the final chapter in a trilogy by Raqs Media Collective, created in collaboration with 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 culminated in the heart of London’s financial district at Seed130.
Watch the performance: Cloud Messengers
Watch Raqs Media Collective’s performance, Cloud Messengers at Seed130 Fenchurch Street, London
14 October 2025.
Part of Forecast by Invisible Dust
Forecast is an evolving programme on ideas that are shaping the future of the planet. With world leading artists, authors, scientists and philosophers, such as celebrated writer Ben Okri, quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli, climate scientist Kevin Anderson, artists Cornelia Parker and Jeremy Deller, we explore new forms of storytelling responding to our planet’s future.
Forecast India takes its starting point from the culture of Indian storytelling, poetry and painting and explores climate futures with the UK’s extreme weather events through conversation, performance and screenings with poets, writers, and scientists. Exploring the intensifying and changing nature of the Indian monsoon and UK rainfall, planetary instability and the shifting nature of financial risk in the heart of the world’s insurance industry where the only constant is change and driving the concern for Net Zero.
Curated by Alice Sharp & Jeanine Griffin of Invisible Dust, supported by a partnership with Futurecity and Frith Street Gallery
Seed130 is led by CO–RE for Aviva Investors, with a design team including WilkinsonEyre and Arup. Curated by Futurecity in collaboration with key partners Invisible Dust and Eastern City Business Improvement District.
