W E A T H E R I N G

The Weathering Report #13

DATE & LOCATION OF OBSERVATIONS

Tuesday 3 – Wednesday 4 March, 2020.
‘Weathering Everything: A Mini-symposium’
CoWS (Community Weathering Station) @ University of New England, Armidale NSW.
Unceded Anaiwan land.

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS

After a devastating summer dominated by bushfires across the country, and months (years?) of drought in the Northern Tablelands region, it had finally rained. And rained. For weeks. By the time our long-anticipated mini-symposium rolled along, the hills were glowing magically green, the creek was high, and all bodies were sopping wet.

Three of five Weathering collective agents present. General mood: pumped.

dramatic arrival at Astrida’s public talk

local waterways in full flow

FORECAST

So happy to be weathering together again! Two jam-packed days of public activities, weathering across spaces (with particular histories, ecologies and capabilities) in new formulations with various others. What can be learnt from opening up our shared pool of thoughts, processes and tools, inviting people in to perform, assess and reshape them with us?

A (water)tight program, with gaps enough for immersion in local watery bodies: 1. the local swimming pool and 2. among the boulders at beautiful Gara gorge.

LATEST WEATHERING ACTIVITY

‘Weathering Everything: A Mini-symposium’ at UNE Armidale Campus, presented by Community Weathering Station (CoWS), a new initiative based in Armidale.
With Dr Astrida Neimanis (USYD), Tessa Zettel (Artist-Researcher), and Dr Jennifer Hamilton (UNE)

Events

Tuesday, March 3: 5pm for 5pm – Public Lecture: Dr Astrida Neimanis “We are all bodies of water; we are always weathering: So Tired, the Sea” (Oorala Lecture Theatre). A performative-lecture first devised as a keynote for the Kelp Congress at Lofoten international Art Festival, Lofoten Islands, Norway (2019). Australian Premiere. Followed by incredible audience discussion and Tessa’s presentation of Making Time: An Illustrated Compendium of Notes on Preserving Food & Futures (2017) book project.
Wednesday, March 4: 7.30am – Community Weathering Station Breakfast (Lake Madgwick). Toast, tea, coffee, fruit, an esky or two, a marquee by a stormwater lake, picnic blankets, a slowed-down walk around the water’s edge, a family of ducks, a swampy mirrored body of water with a past (or many), quickly drawn maps of micro-climates in motion on index cards.
Wednesday, March 4: 2pm – Weathering the Apocalpyse: Survival Skills Workshop (A1 Arts Theatre Stage). Tucked away backstage in the university theatre, a group of participants learning how to darn holes and sew books by hand, making a stack of collaborative rapid-fire zines spanning climate change, micro/macro scale, love, the apocalypse. Alongside, a micro-salon pop-up from Haircuts for Planetary Survival.

SATELLITE IMAGES

Countrylink!

Lake Madgwick

Breakfast mapping

WARNINGS CURRENT

COVID-19 lurking barely perceptible on the horizon. Longer than usual hand-washing, toilet paper already flying off the shelves. Suggestion to make ‘family cloth‘ at the Survival Skills workshop (instead of darning Jen’s family woollies) not met with enthusiasm. Too soon?

On the cards.. other than sudden global shutdown of all social life, several good things:

finally, another Occasional Supplement! #2 is on the way. we promise.
co-authored journal paper reflecting on the mini-symposium and our methods to date. More soon.
an edition of the full set of collaborative zines from the Survival Skills workshop. Printed and being folded/assembled together ready for posting as we type.
Meth Lab poster to be prepared for printing at our favourite offset print collective Big Fag Press (long-range view)
more weathering with CoWS in Armidale later this year.

WEATHER MAPS

LIVE READINGS

Our own Bush Google (aka Bec Giggs) has a book!!!!!! Out with Scribe, Fathoms: The World in the Whale, is an absolute winner. The Weathering collective was *almost* complete at its socially distanced online mini-launch last month. A review in The Saturday Paper describes the book thus: “horrific, poetic and profound; a morbid dirge shot through with celestial light”.
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, ‘On Slowing Down for Urgent Times’ on For the Wild podcast
Nigel Clarke and Kathryn Yusoff (2018) ‘Queer fire: ecology, combustion and pyrosexual desire’ in Feminist Review; alongside, always, Alexis Wright and Audre Lorde and more, for this month’s COMPOSTING Feminisms & the Environmental Humanities #50: ‘REBUILD’ in the Cloud, miraculously squeezed into a free pocket of the mini-symposium’s bottomless schedule.

Weathering Report #12: weathering “in the wake”

Date and Location

Senate House, University of London

Wednesday October 24 2018

Atmospheric Conditions

Sunny and warm enough to eat lunch together outside, prior to the workshop!

Forecast

From the feminist review blog:

In conjunction with the publication of the journal Feminist Review on ‘Environment’, we are pleased to co-host a workshop with the Centre for Feminist Research (Goldsmiths) on the theme of environmental humanities and feminism with Astrida Neimanis* at Senate House (University of London) on Wednesday 24th October 2018, 2-5pm.

The workshop will explicitly take up the concept of “weathering” as it has developed most recently in the work of US feminists of colour. We will work with it as a method of bodily engagement with climate change. Through discussion, writing, reflection, and interactive exercises, we will examine how we might think of weathering as a complex entangling of ecological, social, and political worlds that has uneven effects. We invite applications from postgraduate students, early career scholars, activists and artists who are interested in examining and experimenting with the uses of weathering.

Please send a short statement (250-300 words) outlining your areas of work and how it would benefit from participation in the workshop to Astrida at astrida.neimanis@sydney.edu.au by 1 October 2018. Participants will be asked to read “Weathering” (Neimanis and Hamilton, feminist review 118 [2018]: 80-84) as advance preparation.

Screenshot 2018-10-27 21.34.42

(How will you weather in the wake?)

Satellite Images

None (no fly zone)

Overheard

questions from participants

Live Readings:

All participants are asked to read Neimanis and Hamilton, “Weathering” feminist review 2018.

ADDITIONAL / OPTIONAL READING: Other related pieces you might wish to look at include:

– Christina Sharpe “The Weather” (Chap 4 from In the Wake)

– Any of the texts written by Arline Geronimus on the “weathering hypothesis” in the context of public health research that demonstrates “that the health of African-American women may begin to deteriorate in early adulthood as a physical consequence of cumulative socioeconomic disadvantage”

(E.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1467758) (NB: I was only recently made aware of this important work through Yasmin Gunaratnam, who passed on the observation that the original cfp for this workshop did not acknowledge these important contributions on weathering from black feminist contexts. I am eager to explore this more.)

– Neimanis and Walker, “Weathering: Climate Change and the Thick Time of Transcorporeality”Hypatia, 2014.

The Weathering Report #11

DATE & LOCATION OF OBSERVATIONS
Friday February 9, 2018

Skype (Newtown, Sydney University, King’s Cross and the University of New England)

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS

Physical human beings discretely situated in different places, with different (but probably quite similar) interior conditions, connected in discussion by cable and wi-fi and computer and lots of energy

FORECAST

A less ambitious year than the non-existent Master Vision of 2017. 2018 will be a year of “intentional adhockery”. Or, a year of epistolary weatherings, parcels of weather sent and received and archived online. Hopefully with one or two fleshy meetings of two, or three or four of us. Of course, we are all weathering alone and together all the time. But there’s something about bodies in proximity that we agree is special.

SATELLITE IMAGES

WARNINGS CURRENT

Letters to be sent to each other in 2018. Private address book to be maintained by the collective.

Photographs of correspondence to be uploaded to blog developing some kind of archive.

Printing to be done on Big Fag press (at least one of the big plans from 2017 coming to fruition, surprisingly! – with some serious intentional adhockery)

OVERHEARD:

“intentional adhockery”

“letter writing! / can we send each other parcels of weather?”

LIVE READINGS

Anna Tsing – The Mushroom at the End of the World – for this very Weathering quote:

“Anyone who cares about ideas then, is forced to create scenes that exceed or escape “professionalization”, that is, the surveillance techniques of privatization. This means designing research that requires playgroups and collaborative clusters: not congeries of individual calculating costs and benefits, but rather scholarship that emerges through its collaborations”

The Weathering Map of Microclimates & Approximate Watery Bodies

This year saw the publication of a cartographic undertaking we’ve been cooking since 2016. It was commissioned by Chart Collective as part of Legend, an online edition of written work engaging with the potent fictional constructs we call maps.

Our piece, Weathering Station: The Weathering Map of Microclimates & Approximate Watery Bodies (2017), is an interactive map tracing out some specific microclimates that we find interesting, distributed as we are now rather widely across the hemispheres. Each of us wrote a text from a particular place; these were then used as the basis for a collective map (drawn by Tessa) of our various individual weatherings.

The map includes tiny adapted weather icons like those you might see in a forecasting app, as entry points into the texts. Selecting one brings up the nearest body of water to that writer’s location, which in turn takes you to one monster collective water body, mutating out of one of those rising global temperatures graph that we’ve been seeing quite a lot of lately:

“A small tempest swallowed, drought written on the skin, rivulets making their way from our insides to out, from watery womb to watery world: as much as we are weather, we are bodies of water. To map our belonging to the perspiring earth begins with the geography closest in.   This map registers our location in a hydrocommons of microclimates, local waters and wet bodies.”

Thanks to Chart Collective for the opportunity & stay tuned for a print version of the map at some point.

(… meanwhile, you may recall this behind-the-scenes despatch from Parc Tournay-Solvay, Brussels, to the Global Ecologies conference, posted previously in Weathering Report #4):

Occasional Supplement #1

Our first Occasional Supplement – ‘But how are we going to print the moon?’Or, the weather of one’s stride as measured by a plastic bucket, a string, a piece of paper, a pencil, movement and time – has arrived! It’s a hard-copy supplement to The Weathering Report #1, and contains the results of an exercise we conducted last January in measuring the weather of a moving body, as well as extracts from Merleau-Ponty and CA Conrad, who were in the air at that time.

The booklet is a classic A6 8-page folded zine. We printed 30 of them on the riso at The Rizzeria collective in Sydney, in a rather fetching grey ink on black paper, and still have a few left. If you’d like one, leave a comment below and we’ll tell you how.

More to follow, in good time.

The Weathering Report #10

DATE & LOCATION OF OBSERVATIONS:

13th & 14th June, 2017 on Rindö Island in the Stockholm Archipelago

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS

All weathers were experienced, except snow and night.

Cosmic: daylight, civic twilight, nautical twilight, astronomical twilight

Meteorologic: Sun (bright, dull), wind (strong, gentle), rain (light, heavy), fog (thick, misty), rainbow (overland, overwater)

FORECAST

Two days of “The Weathering Lab” as part of the Wild Weatheirng Collaboratory. A workshop designed to experiment with some of the tactics developed by the weathering collective with early childhood educators and academics in Sweden, Australia and Canada.

LATEST WEATHERING ACTIVITY:

Tactics for Weathering I: Weather Mapping

Tactics for Weathering II: Measurement and Management

Tactics for Weathering III: Cosmic Weathers, Radical Alterity and Embodied Extrospection

Tactics for Weathering IV: Speculative Design for Better Weathering

Tactics for Weathering V: Weathering Debrief

SATELLITE IMAGES

WARNINGS CURRENT:
This post is a work in progress. Warnings will be reported soon!

OVERHEARD: TBA

LIVE READINGS: TBA

The Weathering Report #9

DATE & LOCATION OF OBSERVATIONS
Thursday 11 May, 2017.
Frontyard Library, Marrickville NSW

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS
8am pastries and tea in the library. Scarcity of sleep coupled with overabundant enthusiasm.

FORECAST
Plotting wildly ambitious larger-scale collective weatherings (in Banff? Sweden?), as well as future encounters we might stage with publics, via research-based residencies, exhibitions and workshops. Considered locations for said encounters: Sydney Observatory (revisiting Dawes research from Tilting at Windmills), Paddington Reservoir, Verge Gallery…[Note: in accordance with the collective’s slow-growth patterns, these developments are not predicted to surface anytime before 2019].

First print publication half-materialised (see Warnings Current) promises more little books further down the track.

> A Short and Incomplete History of Dibble St. Waterhole (forgotten watering hole that cropped up during research for the Chart Collective map. What is it?!)
> potentially another little book on cycling as weathering / weather cycles

Talk of eventually making a short-run edition lithograph print version of the Chart map (see latest Detailed Observation) at Big Fag Press. Or a set of silk-screened tea towels, one for each water body.

LATEST WEATHERING ACTIVITY
Thinking about the politics or implications of weathering (beyond just our experiments and tinkerings).

Concise meeting notes from Jen:

“More public engagement. How…
Rivers Australia
Print on Big Fag
Update blog
Plan”

SATELLITE IMAGES

WARNINGS CURRENT
Four things on the immediate horizon boding well:

1. The Weathering Report Occasional Supplement #1. A slow-cooked small print publication to accompany the very first Weathering Report. With Tessa’s newly-acquired risograph whispering skills, it’s time to finally try printing the moon. You’ll find it on the Cloudship Press table at this year’s Other Worlds zine fair.

2. Our contribution to the forthcoming Chart Collective digital publication should be published sometime *soon*… Another project not in a hurry. See below.

3. Astrida and Jen are writing a piece for the Conversation for the Hacking the Anthropocene conference in late May.

4. In June, Jen and Astrida will travel to Rindö, Sweden to work to integrate ideas and experiments of Weathering with a group of early childhood educators. Full lowdown in the next Weathering Report.

WEATHER MAPS
Microclimates. A collaborative cartographic commission for Chart Collective. Detailed observations available here

LIVE READINGS

Remarkably, just about everyone involved in Weathering has a new book out right now. Reading close to home this month, kids!

Jennifer Mae Hamilton (2017), This Contentious Storm: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear, Bloomsbury
Astrida Neimanis (2017), Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, Bloomsbury
Kate Wright (2016), Transdisciplinary Journeys in the Anthropocene: More than Human Encounters, Routledge
Tessa Zettel & Susie Nelson (2017), Making Time: An Illustrated Compendium of Notes on Preserving Food + Futures in an Age of Unsettlement, Cloudship Press
&.. while we wait for Bec Giggs’s forthcoming book on whales, here’s a new piece from her on jellyfish Imagining the jellyfish apocalypse, published in The Atlantic.

The Weathering Report #8: Ecocritical Field Experiments on Observatory Hill

DATE & LOCATION OF OBSERVATIONS
Wednesday May 11, 2017
Observatory Hill, NSW

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS

Phenomenally perfect weather, according to Jennifer Hamilton (1/5th of Weathering), who took her NYU Sydney “Readings in Contemporary Literary Theory: Ecocriticism” students out for the afternoon. We caught the last rays of orange sun, and watched it set over the great dividing range for the last class of the semester.

FORECAST

How can we sense climate change by attuning ourselves differently to the weather?

LATEST WEATHERING ACTIVITY

Worksheet – Download Here

SATELLITE IMAGES

WARNINGS CURRENT

Overheard:

“This is actually perfect weather”

“I don’t want to leave Sydney”

“I wish all classes would be outside”

WEATHER MAPS

Lost in transit

LIVE READINGS

Neimanis, Astrida & Rachel Lowen Walker “Weathering: Climate Change and the Thick Time of Transcorporeality”

The Weathering Report #7: Ecocritical Experiments at Bronte Beach

DATE & LOCATION OF OBSERVATIONS
Thursday December 15, 2016
Bronte Beach, NSW

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS
Cool and cloudy early-summer day, with intermittent light rain and light winds. Jennifer Hamilton (1/5th of Weathering) took her NYU Sydney “Readings in Contemporary Literary Theory: Ecocriticism” students to the beach. We gathered barefoot, put our toes in the water and considered what they’ve learned in the semester. The water was warmer than the air. The waves were big and stormy.

FORECAST
How can we translate theoretical learning and the reading of fiction into conventional professions such as journalism, NGO service and policy making?

LATEST WEATHERING ACTIVITY
Choose an envelope. Engage in considering your body and weather. Standing sitting raising arms up, reflect. How is the weather different in different postures? How can you feel the weather and the world in your breath? Images from this activity are included below.

We also played the Game of Global Futures as a way of escaping the rain.

SATELLITE IMAGES

WARNINGS CURRENT
Overheard:

“When I breathe I feel cleansed, as though the dirtiness of my body gets exhaled”

“When I breathe I feel like the dirt is coming inward”

“Let us go to a cafe and have pizza and tea and shelter from the rain and play the Game of Global Futures”

“President Beyoncé”

WEATHER MAPS
Thinking about the waves as displaced weathers (See “Weather Maps” on https://weatherings.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/the-weathering-report-5-the-weather-underwater-wave-weather/) took on a new dimension in this session. The body of water known as the Pacific Ocean connects Australia to the USA. In putting our toes in the water while weathering we were experiencing that connection.

LIVE READINGS
Tsing, Anna & Pollman, Elizabeth. “Global Futures: The Game”. Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding (eds), Histories of the Future (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): 105-122.

The Weathering Report #6

DATE & LOCATION OF OBSERVATIONS
November 30 – Dec 3, 2016
Technicity, Temporality, Embodiment: 10th International Somatechnics Conference
Byron Bay, NSW

Workshop led by Astrida Neimanis: “The Weathering Report”

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS
After several days of hot hot heat in Byron, our (outdoor) workshop was inaugurated by a thunderstorm. Bring on the weather!

(while writing this post in [ahem] February 2018, I am listening to Weather Report on youtube.

FORECAST

Workshop description in the Conference handbook:

How might we understand and practice “weathering” as a somatechnique for embodying climate change? In the context of a dominant climate change imaginary (in the so-called developed world), this phenomenon is too often posited as distant and abstracted from our everyday experiences of weather (see e.g. Neimanis and Walker 2014; Yusoff and Gabrys 2011). Such abstraction is buttressed by either neoliberal progress narratives of controlling the future or sustainability narratives of saving the past. Both largely obfuscate the ways that our bodies weather the world, and the ways in which our bodies are both archives and instruments in an ongoing gathering of climate-time. We propose that weathering as concept and practice might work as a poethical interruption to these abstractions.

Bringing together weather and climate change in and as the body calls for a new understanding of measurement that exceeds the aggregation of data that we take as a sign of global warming. In this paper we thus explore how technologies for measuring the weather impact upon our embodied understanding of meteorology and simultaneously ask how the body is also barometer and thermometer. In turn, how do bodies become archives of climate-time or repositories of data in ways akin to but strikingly different from an ice core.

Here, we present a Weathering Report that enacts our collective’s ongoing collaborative project in the art of weathering; we will unpack the theoretical underpinnings of our project, but more importantly, we will demonstrate weathering somatechniques through a series of interlaced and intra-active (Barad 2007) readings, visualizations, and short participatory activities. In particular, we will activate weathering keywords such as scale / ants / lightening / measuring device / catchment. In doing so, we are reminded that we are not masters of the climate, nor are we just spatially “in” it. Instead, we wish to ask how activating ourselves as weather-bodies can provide new imaginaries of climate change—linking this ineffable and massive “wicked problem” to the very banal, intimate and felt experience of weather.

LATEST WEATHERING ACTIVITY

Lucky Dip! Participants choose from a wide variety of instructions in small envelopes. They can spend most of the session focusing on one instruction, or they can try as many as they like.
Calibrating the Weather Machines: participants were asked to collectively and collaboratively read some portions of text, marking them up as they would do in their own individual reading practices. Discussion: what do these quotes and offerings inspire? How do you interpret them? How do they articulate new patterns and vectors of connection between human bodies as weather machines, and the weather world around us?
Weather-Machine-Maker: Using the props on hand (or not), design an instrument for measuring the weather. (What is ‘the weather’ that you are measuring? How will you measure it? What will your data reveal?)

SATELLITE IMAGES