Weathering is a slow-growth transdisciplinary research project currently tended by Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Tessa Zettel and Astrida Neimanis. Formed in 2016 on Gadigal Land (Sydney), its initial phase also included and was shaped by co-founders Katherine Wright and Rebecca Giggs. The project is an experimental collaboration around the seemingly quotidian phenomenon of weather and the theme of weathering as an embodied experience. We acknowledge Indigenous Australians’ unfathomable weathering of settler invasion and much more through time, and that land & water sovereignty were never ceded.
This blog shares our collective thinkings, meanderings and writings, which you might also encounter elsewhere as a mini publication, a conference presentation, a workshop, an exhibition, a map, a walk, a camping trip, a book, or a journal paper (etc.).
Who are we?
We are a small collaborative of writers, artists, educators, activists, in varying proportions and configurations, who all have ongoing and imagined practices for engaging weather. We share interests in engaging weather in relation to climate change as an embodied phenomenon; as activating the porous boundaries between humans and non-human natures; and as a place-body interface that takes up questions of time, flux, memory, cyclicality; and as a site of elemental affect—amongst others. Some of our past/current weather projects include ‘Tilting at Windmills’ (residency exploring William Dawes’s weather journals, Hamilton + Zettel); collaborative “Weather Writing” workshops in North America and Europe (Neimanis); “Walking in the Rain” (Performance Space, Hamilton); “Cherry Tree Weather” (Aeon essay, Giggs).
Why weathering?
Weathering as a means of embodying climate change: In a dominant “climate change” imaginary, in the so-called developed world, climate is often distant and abstracted from our everyday experiences of weather. 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 archives in an ongoing gathering of climate-time. This project reminds us that we are not masters of the climate, nor are we just spatially “in” it. We wish to ask how activating ourselves as weather-bodies, through various collaborative creative practices, can provide new imaginaries of climate change—linking this ineffable and massive “wicked problem” to the very banal, intimate and felt experience of weather.