Participants: Rebecca Giggs, Macquarie University, Jennifer Mae Hamilton, University of Sydney, Astrida Neimanis, University of Sydney, Katherine Wright, Southern Cross University, and Tessa Zettel, independent artist

Project description: The Weather Collective is a research collaboration of writers, artists, and academics experimenting in how we understand the weather. The project investigates the seemingly quotidian phenomenon of weather and the theme of weathering as an embodied experience. In a dominant “climate change” imaginary, in the so-called developed world, climate is often distant and abstracted from our everyday experiences of weather. 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. We are interested in activating the porous boundaries between humans and non-human natures, and experimenting in ways of understanding and activating a place-body interface that takes up questions of time, flux, memory, cyclicality.

Output:

Ongoing research blog “The Weathering Report” (weatherings.blogspot.com)

Collaborative Practice-Based Field Research at Ingar Dam, February 2016

Neimanis, Astrida, Participatory Weathering seminar at the Somatechnics conference in Byron Bay, Australia, December 2016

Production of a Weathering Microclimates Map published by Chart Collective, Australia, 2017: http://weatheringstation.net/2017/12/18/the-weathering-map-of-microclimates-approximate-watery-bodies/