Emotional Weathers

Essay for Everybody Talks about the Weather exhibition catalogue, Fondazione Prada, Venice
April 2023

Excerpt from the essay:

Frequently, when we talk about the weather, we are speaking of home, whether directly or somewhere at a slight remove. Often, we find that home somewhere in the distance of childhood. That sense of home that only the plasticity of a child’s brain can accept as the world, can make into a world, can live as if it were the world. And maybe that’s because weather grows within us as we within it – it is a fundamental element in shaping a brain, that then itself shapes an understanding of being-in-the-world. 

What of home, then, when climate breakdown, or diasporic distance, or land dispossession, or environmental poisoning of all kinds, that the powerful so arrogantly spew into earths and waters – what of home, when home is eroding, burning, disappearing. When home is gone, or going; when it has been gone for decades, or centuries. What, then, of home and its weathers? 

Since reactionary Eurotrash nationalisms prey on a kind of nostalgia, turning the notion of “home” into a hateful, nihilistic hellscape, it might perhaps be simpler to speak of the weather, after all. Of an emotional weather of home - not as a right conquered by swords or sticks (to paraphrase Ursula LeGuin), but as a practice woven with the threads that make baskets;  threads that connect smells, tastes, the feeling of weather on our bodies, the weathering of our bodies, the colours of the evening sky, she shapes of leaves, and then the qualities of the ground. These threads, woven together to make a world, such as it is given to us to experience it.