What is a web to the spider? A home, a tool, simply something they cling to? Tomás Saraceno presents these questions in a new segment from Art21, in which filmmakers visit his Berlin studio and examine the machinations of his collaborative practice, extending from a team of people to the tiny critters beneath our feet.

Saraceno continually considers how humans occupy space and how such environments inform the ways we connect with the world around us. This short documentary, which is part of the “Realms of the Real” episode, reviews several of the artist’s projects, from his suspended installations to his more participatory community projects.

Several artworks presented in the film have been previously featured on Colossal, and the film offers insight into the evolution of Saraceno’s thinking over several years. Much of his work strives for connection and empathy building, which he explains through the structure of the web. “It’s really trying to extend the ability of understanding who is our family, right? Who is our brothers, sisters, and grandfathers?” he says. “By allowing others to admire these incredible webs, they will become more empathetic.”

Find more Art21 films on YouTube, along with some of our favorites previously on Colossal.

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When we think of terms like “flowing” or “fluid,” we could be referring to the nature of water, but we can also just as easily apply these concepts to our understanding of art and craft. Fabrics “pool” and different mediums converge. The nature of creativity is often referred to in terms of an “ebb and flow.” Ecologically speaking, bodies of water are metaphorically woven into the fabric of our planet. Rivers and lakes sustain an abundance of life, shape cultures, and course through history. Amid the ongoing climate crisis, how do artists express concerns about water and the environment?

Water | Craft, a group exhibition at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, dives into this question. The museum itself is situated on the banks of the Mississippi River and often directly engages with its expansive biological and cultural reach. Works by seven artists, whose practices incorporate weaving, pottery, basketry, glass, and textile arts, directly interface with contemporary issues of water access and cultural preservation amid climate change.

Colossal readers may be familiar with the mixed-media pieces of Tali Weinberg and Nicole McLaughlin, both of whom combine quantities of colorful thread with other materials in meditations on interconnectivity and multi-disciplinarity. Weinberg translates ecological data into tendril-like installations and abstract weavings, such as a series of three pieces from her Climate Datascapes series that visualize information about silt in the Upper Mississippi River. McLaughlin’s dramatically fringed ceramic platters reference Pre-Columbian cultures and the continuum of human history and time.

Water | Craft also includes works by Rowland Ricketts, Sarah Sense, Therman Statom, Kelly Church, and Tanya Aguiñiga. The latter is known for her intricately knotted wall works containing terracotta forms, which cascade gently to the floor. And Ricketts’ large-scale installation, “Bow,” comprises strands of indigo-dyed linen that suspend within a large gallery space, creating the effect of a current or perhaps the silhouette of a boat.

“Just as water flows through bodies, landscapes, and cultural histories, craft knowledge is passed between generations, carrying technical skills alongside cultural values,” the museum says. “The artists in Water | Craft employ traditional methods not as nostalgic gestures, but as living practices that continue to evolve in response to environmental change.”

Water | Craft continues through December 27 in Winona.

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A photojournalist for the Icelandic daily newspaper Morgunblaðið for 44 years, Ragnar Axelsson is attuned to capturing the moments that tell a story. Mundane activities, impending tragedies, and tender connections between people and animals all figure prominently in his work and offer a portrait of life that comes from being embedded within a community.

Axelsson’s book, Where the World is Melting, applies this journalistic rigor and sensibility to a personal project documenting the indelible impacts of a warming planet from Greenland to Siberia. In grainy black and white, snow-covered tundras and misty shorelines strikingly glimpse an environment in flux. One image in particular reveals a cloud of steam emanating from the melting Kötlujökull glacier in Iceland.

Where the World is Melting focuses on the aging farmers, sled teams, and Indigenous populations all grappling with both drastic changes to their homelands and the traditions they’ve practiced for generations. “What does the future hold for the reindeer herders living in the tundra? Nobody really knows,” Axelsson tells Blind. “A photograph is only a small piece in the jigsaw that makes up the big picture, but sometimes it is these small pieces that open our eyes to the broader reality.”

Available through Kehrer Verlag, Where the World is Melting accompanies an exhibition of Axelsson’s photos on view through May 2026 at the Ernst Leitz Museum in Wetzlar, Germany. Find more of his work on Instagram.

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In “Rio Tigre,” thick globs of fire consume a shoreline forest, while smoke clouds the skies and melts the landscape from top to bottom. Despite this catastrophic setting, there’s also a tiny man standing in a canoe, seemingly unaware or unable to grasp the destruction.

The unsettling scene is part of Alexis Rockman’s Conflagration series, which translates a distinctly contemporary sense of climate anxiety into eerie paintings. Made from oil paint and cold wax on wood, these pieces are chunky and gestural, placing human touch and material excess in direct proximity.

For nearly five decades, Rockman has rooted his practice in environmental concerns. Today, his body of work is a sort of archive of a changing climate, one in which dire warnings about a warming planet have not inspired robust action but rather entrenched us further in a cycle of denial and fatalism.

Feedback Loop, then, is an apt title for the artist’s upcoming debut at Jack Shainman Gallery. Featuring many forest fire paintings, the exhibition will span watercolors and cinematic panoramas Rockman has made throughout his career, along with works containing soil and organic matter gathered near the Great Lakes. This presents a visual timeline of the artist’s thinking on the changing climate, and of course, the newer works feel more urgent. As the years pass, the scale of devastation grows, and the diminutive animals and figures are no match for raging fires that threaten everything in their paths.

In biology, feedback loops are often categorized as either positive or negative, and Rockman suggests that we’ve entrenched ourselves in an inescapable downward spiral. Given the tiny, lone figures that occupy just a few paintings—others simply feature empty boats—he presents a world in which immense damage is done and the chance of rescue is near impossible.

But where Rockman taps into a universal imbalance through recurring motifs of fire and smoke, he’s also interested in the particular. His works are often based on specific locations like South America’s Rio Pastaza or Lake Athabasca, which borders Saskatchewan and Alberta. In this way, he homes in on the hyperlocal, drawing our attention to real places and urgently addressing what we’re already witnessing.

Feedback Loop runs from January 15 to February 28 in New York. Explore more of the artist’s work on his website.

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Enigmatic landscapes and metaphysical scenes unfold in the work of Gideon Kiefer. On canvas and panel, the artist paints countrysides dotted with small fires, pensive figures, and natural phenomena seemingly detached from reality by varying degrees, such as a wave crashing inside of an architectural enclosure or a chunk of purple-tinted landscape floating inside of a celestial cube.

Kiefer is interested in the nature of time and the way we mark its passing. Many of the mysterious notations and framing devices he adds around his esoteric tableaux resemble quickly-scribbled notes, as if for remembering something important, or poetic extracts from diary entries.

At first glance, Kiefer’s scenes often present an initial sense of familiarity or recognition, but the longer one studies the composition, comprehension is gradually dismantled. Notes in the margins may or may not feel relevant, like a doodle on the edge of a document. Or perhaps the phrases and numbers are clues to some arcane puzzle, in which Kiefer presents seemingly disparate pieces for us to try to reassemble.

Within his spatially strange compositions, Kiefer incorporates themes around the climate crisis. As sea levels rise due to melting ice caps and weather patterns change due to warmer temperatures—among myriad other effects—ecological changes and disruptions increasingly affect not only the planet’s flora and fauna but our own communities.

In Kiefer’s atmospheric paintings, stormy waves, mercurial skies, monumental icebergs, and intense fires mirror how the planet is transforming. His pieces also consider how we remember both what has already happened to the planet and acknowledge what is happening right now.

See more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

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In 2019, Cornwall-based artists William Arnold and James Fergusson began paying a lot of attention to wild apple trees growing in unique and sometimes unlikely locations around the Cornish countryside. Remarkably, every apple seed is capable of producing an entirely different variety. And it’s this immense genome that inspired the pair to begin their ongoing project called Some Interesting Apples.

Apple cultivars that we often see in supermarkets, like Gala or Honeycrisp, need to be carefully produced in a process called clonal propagation, in which a cutting from a desirable tree is grafted onto a new one, creating, essentially, a copy. Because even if a Honeycrisp seed sprouted and produced a tree, it wouldn’t be another Honeycrisp!

Arnold and Fergusson have discovered more than 600 wild apple varieties throughout Cornwall over the past seven years. Arnold is a photographer and visually documents new types, while the duo revels in finding and sampling the wide array of “feral” varieties that grow along roadsides and in parks across the county. A new short film, produced by Ffern, rounds up some of the duo’s tasting notes.

Rather than giving individual names to hundreds of different apples, some of which are sweet and dessert-like and some of which are almost too tart to bear, Arnold and Fergusson assign them a what3words designation, using the wayfinding app popular in the U.K. that denotes specific places using three random words rather than GPS coordinates or traditional street addresses.

The what3words location for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, for example, is cage.rocks.gladiators. For Some Interesting Apples, the unique codes provide a useful, sometimes absurd, and occasionally poetic way to label different varieties based on where the trees were found, like a “horse wish gossip” apple, or a “bats prefer flame” variety.

In 2023, in collaboration with the University of Exeter and the National Trust, Arnold and Fergusson spearheaded a unique project called The Wilding Mother Orchard, situated near Helford, which has been established with dozens of wild root stocks. The orchard is not only a celebration of the fruit’s natural diversity but also a way of broaching how the effects of the climate crisis may alter our access to varieties we take for granted in the future.

“People get alarmed when they realise that the heritage apple varieties they love might not survive in a climate-changed world,” Arnold told the BBC. “They don’t appreciate that we are surrounded by unique wild apple volunteers that may be better adapted to future conditions.”

See the short film on Vimeo, and check out Arnold’s photographs on his website.

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“It took seven days to create the world; it only took one to disrupt its balance,” says the tagline for an award-winning animation by a team of students in France. “Au 8ème Jour,” which translates to “On the 8th Day” in French, uses CG, or computer-generated animation techniques to create a three-dimensional world in a stop-motion style.

A multitude of vibrant animals and landscapes appear sewn from fabric in the film’s otherworldly realm, each tethered to a single piece of yarn that connects it to a kind of central energy force—a vibrant, tightly-wrapped skein in the sky. But when mysteriously dark tendrils of black fiber begin to leech into this idyllic world, families and herds must run for their lives.

What’s causing the change—and what the black threads eventually cause—seems beyond imagining. Yet the fantastical situation is not so distant from something familiar right here at home.

The United Nations now concedes that its Paris Climate Agreement goal—limiting global temperature rise, due to greenhouse gas emissions, to 1.5 degrees Celsius above “pre-industrial” levels—is not possible. The science-backed goal was established in 2015 to limit the harms of rising temperatures around the world. Though set in an imaginary world, “Au 8ème Jour” is a beautiful, stark, and poignant reminder of what’s at stake right here on Earth.

“Au 8ème Jour” was created by a team of 5th-year students at Piktura in Roubaix, France, a school focused on animation, illustration, and video game design. The work of Agathe Sénéchal, Flavie Carin, Elise Debruyne, Alicia Massez, and Théo Duhautois, the film has been selected for more than 250 awards. And it’s won 60, including Best Animated Short at both the Bend Film Festival and Santa Barbara International Film Festival last year.

See more from Piktura on Vimeo, and head to the end of this article to glimpse the meticulous behind-the-scenes digital process.

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From record-breaking droughts and catastrophic flash floods to contaminated pipelines and increasingly thirsty AI farms, water is at the nexus of the climate crisis. The life-giving liquid is both scarce and too abundant, causing half the global population to lack sustained access to fresh drinking water, while much of the world is subject to hotter, wetter weather that subsumes communities with extreme conditions.

For designer, author, and activist Julia Watson, pinpointing myriad approaches to these all-consuming problems is one of the most critical and urgent tasks today. Her new book Lo-TEK Water, published by Taschen, highlights various Indigenous technologies and aquatic systems that could be utilized in adapting to a climate-changed world.

There are the two-meter-deep canals of Xochimilco, Mexico, which delineate 55,000 square meters of raised fields called chinampas. While built by the Aztecs to clean the water and irrigate crops, this system actually originated with the Nahua people. Similar are the floating islands of Intha Myanmar, which weave together roots, leaves, sediment, and other materials to create hydroponic beds.

Although Watson is keen to draw on ancient practices that could be more widely utilized today, she also highlights more modern approaches, like Pakistan’s Yasmeen Lari, an architect who’s responsible for devising the world’s largest program for creating shelters and cookware that leave no carbon footprint.

At 558 pages, Lo—TEK Water positions “water as an intelligent force that can shape resilient cities and landscapes. Aquatic infrastructure is reframed—from extractive and industrial into regenerative and evolving—designed to sustain life for generations,” a statement says.

Watson is a key voice in the broader Lo—TEK movement, and this new book is a companion to her previous volume focused on sustainable technologies. Find your copy on Bookshop.

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An unassuming cacao tree in Indonesia has made a unique connection to a high-tech artwork in China. Thanks to ecological data artist Thijs Biersteker, “ORIGIN” is a sculpture — a “digital twin” — that reflects the sensors monitoring the growth and elemental experiences of the tropical tree through pulses of light.

“When it rains in Indonesia, you see the sap flow through the sculpture in real time,” the artist says. “When the air quality shifts, the flows respond. During a heatwave, the tree visibly struggles. This real-time installation reveals just how fragile the cacao supply chain has become.”

A majority of cacao, the primary ingredient in chocolate, is cultivated in places that are also the most vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis. Extreme weather, habitat destruction, and other issues also mean that global food resiliency is increasingly threatened.

For Biersteker, data provides unique insights into changes on the ground, and through a recent collaboration with the Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute (ICCRI), he devised a way to literally illuminate environmental impacts.

The artist collaborates with environmental scientists to explore the relationship between data and nature, harnessing science for communication and to show how every change affects biodiversity, food, and habitats. Hooking up sensors to a specimen at ICCRI’s research site in Java, Bierksteker created a translucent, sculptural mirror of the tree, which is currently installed at Zaishui Art Museum in the city of Rizhao, Shandong Province.

Another work, “WITHER,” in collaboration with UNICEF, comprises a tropical installation with flickering leaves representing rainforest loss. Each disappearing leaf symbolizes 128 square meters of deforestation, based on data from Amazon rainforest watch groups. And “ECONTINUUM,” a collaboration with Stefano Mancuso, invites us into a kind of “conversation” occurring between tree roots in a twinkling digital composition. The work nods to recent scientific discoveries that show how trees communicate with one another via their intricate subterranean systems to provide or request nutrients or warn others of dangers like disease or infestations.

For “ORIGIN,” the live cacao tree in Java transmits information, its digital copy animating with fluctuating light. “This mirrors the role of the institutions behind it: making the invisible visible and reconnecting people with the systems that feed them,” Biersteker says in a statement. “It is where data begins to speak to the imagination and where data-driven art becomes a new language for change.”

Explore more on Bierksteker’s website and Instagram. If you enjoy pieces that explore the intersection of data and nature, you’ll also like Marshmallow Laser Feast’s “Of the Oak” installation at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

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Between 450 B.C.E. and 950 C.E., a particularly fertile soil known by researchers as terra preta, literally “black earth” in Portuguese, was cultivated by Indigenous farmers in the Amazon Basin. The soil was made with broken pottery, compost, bones, manure, and charcoal—which lends its characteristic dark shade—making it rich in nutrients and minerals.

The historic, fecund material becomes a symbolic nexus for the exhibition Black Earth Rising, now on view at Baltimore Museum of Art. Curated by journalist and writer Ekow Eshun, the show illuminates several links between the climate crisis, land, presence, colonization, diasporas, and social and environmental justice.

Accompanying the exhibition is a new anthology published by Thames & Hudson titled Black Earth Rising: Colonialism and Climate Change in Contemporary Art, which highlights works by more than 150 African diasporic, Latin American, and Native American contemporary artists.

The volume explores intersections between slavery and forced migration, the environmental consequences of colonialism, socio-political injustices experienced by urban Black and Brown communities, and the violent occupation of Native lands—all through the lens of learning from Indigenous knowledge systems and a wide range of cultural practices to consider more carefully how we view and interact with the natural world.

Black Earth Rising brings together striking works by some of the art world’s most prominent practitioners, from Cannupa Hanska Luger and Precious Okoyoman to Wangechi Mutu and Firelei Báez, among many others. Hanska Luger’s ongoing project, Future Ancestral Technologies, takes a multimedia approach to science fiction as a vehicle for collective thinking. Luger describes the project as a way to imagine “a post-capitalism, post-colonial future where humans restore their bonds with the earth and each other.”

Carrie Mae Weems’ photograph “A Distant View,” from The Louisiana Project, approaches the history of enslaved women in the South through the perspective of a muse—the artist herself—spectrally inhabiting a seemingly idyllic landscape. Reflecting on the relaxed atmosphere of the image, we’re confronted with the stark reality experienced by Black people who were forced to labor on plantations, these grand houses now symbolic of atrocious violence and inequities.

“Black Earth Rising presents a discourse on climate change that places the voices of people of color at the active center rather than on the passive periphery,” says a statement from the publisher.

Through a wide variety of paintings, photography, sculpture, installation, and interdisciplinary pieces, readers—and visitors to the exhibition—are invited to consider how the continuum of history influences the climate crisis today and how we can proceed toward a future that centers unity and deeper relationships with nature.

The Black Earth Rising exhibition continues through September 21. Find your copy of the anthology on Bookshop, and plan your visit to the show on the Baltimore Museum of Art’s website.

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