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):