Author: Tessa

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

 

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 #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 #1

Welcome to the very first Weathering Report, an irregular account of our collaborative endeavours as they unfold.

DATE & LOCATION OF OBSERVATIONS
29 Jan, 2016, Cook’s River, Marrickville

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS
In both the dominant environmental imaginary and empirical scientific study, climate change is too often posited as distant and abstracted from our everyday experiences of weather. Either neoliberal progress narratives of controlling the future or sustainability narratives of saving the past buttress such abstraction. Both largely obfuscate the ways that our bodies weather the world and are part of the changing climate.

FORECAST
Working together in a new collaborative configuration, we propose the concept and practice of weathering as a “poethical” interruption to these abstractions — as a way to radically localise, or embody, the global phenomenon of climate change. Over the coming months/years, we look forward to exploring, devising and sharing different approaches to meteorology as a multispecies endeavour, paying particular attention to the temporalities and instrumentalities of weather as it is encountered and understood by different bodies.

LATEST WEATHERING ACTIVITY
After some months of percolation, our first meeting took place on a hot late-January afternoon. Hosted by Astrida in Marrickville, we spent a few happy hours in a shady nook of the Cook’s River, sharing texts, exercises and possibilities. On the agenda were turning verbs into action, scientific poetry and problems that are uninhabitable. Jen led a short exercise in list-making (‘When weather annoys me’), and Stephanie brought along a makeshift wind-drawing device constructed from a bucket, some string and a pencil.

Here are Bec’s notes:

  • “Your teeth and how to keep them”;
  • Transcorporeal bodies;
  • Torquing; 
  • Exodeviance;
  • Language adequate to experience; 
  • Beaufort wind scale; 
  • Naturalising the boiling point of water—a fiction on which celsius is founded; 
  • Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (terrestrial bodies); 
  • Silent design; 
  • “De-thing-ify the body” said Kate W; 
  • Why would a feminist only be interested in the human?;
  • Water divining; 
  • Writing is inadequate; 
  • How we have swallowed barometers; 
  • Wind-socks on the head; 
  • ‘Prospect and refuge’, where you sit in a room. 
  • And in response to Jen’s weather exercise—1. ‘widow-makers’, the big eucalypts in dry high wind; 2. rips; 3. stinger weather, overcast, still hot days; 4. being cold, cold feet, the trouble of winter shoes; 5. Taking the weather with you; 6. storm-food (inevitably cheese sandwiches with margarine on white bread).  

SATELLITE IMAGES

weathering

WARNINGS CURRENT
On the horizon for us: a collective residency somewhere out of the city, to feel the weather on a different time scale and in less protective surroundings.

WEATHER MAPS
The weather of one’s stride as one walks from the Cook’s River to Church St as measured by a plastic bucket, a string, a piece of paper, a pencil, movement and time.

  

 

LIVE READINGS
CA Conrad
Germaine Greer – White Beach
Merleau-Ponty – Lectures on Nature

 

Stay tuned for the Occasional Weathering Report Supplement, a micro print-publication set to accompany these online reports.

Scroll to top