On the opening day of the Venice Biennale, a heavy storm swept through the city, with it a relentless downpour that lasted for several hours. Harsh winds disrupted flight paths, damaged local facades, and sent umbrellas spiralling into the sky. For those attuned to the unpredictable nature of the local weather, scenes like these aren’t that surprising. The acqua alta (‘high water') usually occurs when strong winds from the southeast cause temporary flooding across the city. Wind also plays a major role in Venetian folklore, whether it’s the melancholic Scirocco, likely responsible for the storm, or the maddening Boras.

That same day, Jenna Sutela, the Berlin-based artist behind the Finnish Pavilion, unveiled her installation, Aeolian Suite, featuring an eccentric cast of wiggy characters, each one resembling the five winds of Venice. Sutela had spent the past months translating meteorological data from the nearby Aqua Alta Oceanographic Tower into a composition, combined with a woodwind orchestra and field recordings of the winds in Venice and Helsinki. “Listening to the wind is one way of staying porous to the world,” she explains, “of recognising registers beyond us and yet shaped by us.”

Told through the lens of Italy’s nomadic theatre tradition, commedia dell’arte, Sutela’s five protagonists – kinetic sculptures, featuring soft, fuzzy hairdos, each with their own theatrical, tempestuous personality – are puppet-like in form, their silver tresses animated by the wind. Sutela likens them to oversized wind muffs, the ones used to shield microphones from environmental noises. But, instead of blocking out unwanted interference, they amplify it. “Wind on the microphone creates noise,” she elaborates, “but the same wind that interferes with our recording is also what makes sound possible at all – in a vacuum, there’s no sound.” 

Our connection – or disconnection – with the environment is a consistent theme across Sutela’s work, which explores the non-human forces that shape biological and technological systems – from slime moulds to gut bacteria to machine intelligence. Bringing attention to the “languages beyond those known to us as of yet”, Aeolian Suite’s elemental drama invites audiences to reflect on what we consider noise and our relationship to the social and ecological world – what media theorist K Allado McDowell describes as “an act of becoming other than ourselves.” Here, wind acts as a meta-medium: a carrier of lost signals, channelling winds, words and sounds across the landscape, shapeshifting through the spaces between objects. By doing so, it questions the limits of human perception – our empirical obsession with the collecting, measuring, and recording of data. It’s no coincidence that Sutela references grammelot, a technique used in commedia dell’arte, the art of speaking without words, to echo the wind’s own alien language. 

The uncontrollable nature of the wind sits in opposition to human efforts to capture and record its movements. There’s an unsteady feedback loop: the more computing power is required to predict weather patterns, the more carbon dioxide is produced, which ultimately makes the weather more extreme. “Changing wind patterns reflect broader environmental and social conditions,” says Sutela. “Weather becomes infrastructure and politics – a sign of the times in the climate crisis era.”

Yet, throughout all this, it’s hard not to consider the digital turbulence that we’re confronted with each day; the endless streams of data, images and algorithmic others that hijack our attention and override our senses. It seems that the more informational noise that we experience, the stronger our desire to tune out our wider environment. Expanding our field of sensory perception might allow us to listen in different ways. As Pauline Oliveros, avant-garde composer and pioneer of deep listening, writes, “Listening is directing attention to what is heard, gathering meaning, interpreting and deciding on action.” 

Commissioner Frame Contemporary Art Finland presents Aeolian Suite by artist Jenna Sutela at the Pavilion of Finland, as part of the 61st International Venice Biennale, on view until November 22, 2026.