Breezy does it

From Barcelona to Bohemia, artists are using arange of innovative techniques to capture and harness the power of mighty winds

- Philip Oltermann

Trying to catch the wind may seem a futile task, but inside the Bora museum in the Italian city of Trieste, there is proof that it can be done, as long as you have the right container. On the shelves, you can find an offshore breeze from Barcelona in a perfume decanter, a Bohemian downwind in a mustard jar, an angry mistral in a plastic water bottle and a humid Swiss föhn in a test tube.

Pride of place is taken by a vintage year of the wind that gives the museum its name, captured in a paint-sample tin: a bora from February 1954, when cold gusts dive-bombed from the karst hills into the Adriatic sea at a record speed of 171km/h.

The collection of 400 bottled winds is museum director Rino Lombardi's lifetime project: a practical joke he came up with more than 25 years ago and kept going until it turned into an accidental work of art. "In Trieste, the wind is not just a wind - it's an institution," says Lombardi.

As his museum grew, Lombardi incorporated artworks inspired by the gale that the French writer Stendhal bemoaned as the "abominable bora": Roberto Pastrovicchio's photographs of broken umbrellas, paintings of local folk buffeted by the breeze, kites, pinwheels, whirligigs. "The wind is the soul of our town," Lombardi says. "It's our history and memories, our literature and art, but it's also always new. It brings new ideas."