As the editors of m-est.org, we’ve been exploring artistic strategies for weather reporting since Spring 2022. Commissioned for the World Weather Network, a constellation of weather stations located across the world, and with the invitation of SAHA in Istanbul, we worked with nine artists-writers to develop texts and events, reflecting on how they respond to ideas of change, crisis, and future. Here we discuss the project’s unfolding and why we insist on working on artists’ writings. –Özge Ersoy and Merve Ünsal 

Özge: If you were asked to report on the weather, where would you begin? Would you only talk about what you observed yesterday, the last week, or the last year? Would you compare this decade to the previous one? Or would you think of weather reporting as a form of forecasting—fabulating and speculating? These are the questions that launched our conversations with the nine artists-writers we invited to contribute to our yearlong series for World Weather Network.  

We think of m-est.org, our online publishing platform, as an extension of our dinner-table conversations with artists where we discuss ideas in progress, what troubles us, and what we get excited about in our respective practices. Similarly, for this series, our priority has been to commission artists’ writings to explore ideas of locality, uncertainty, and the future—to narrate and speculate on the low- and high-pressure areas that they inhabit in their work, studios, and communities. For us, artists’ writings constitute a particular discursive genre, a distinct site of artistic practice that reveals the compressions, the artistic methods, and the existing conventions in our field.

Merve: Thinking about weather reporting had two implications for me. One was an insistence on locality as weather is a local event, phenomenon, and state. This meant that we would be reporting from wherever the artists were, physically and otherwise. The second was that reporting inevitably implies a direct conveyance of information and data, which, at first, seems counterintuitive to what artists’ practices do. As such, as one of the contributing artists to the series, I found this tension, this blurring of boundaries between place and subject, to be infinitely productive. 

We prompted artists and writers to think about the weather wherever they were at the moment. Some  turned to the air that moves in and out of their bodies to be poignant in that it points to a mutual implication. While Can Küçük wrote about the stickiness of breath in an emerging love in “Will Be Ignited”, Kiều-Anh Nguyễn talked about air holding memory in “ventilation veins.” In “with the breath of the wind like a small cloud,” I discussed the wind as a storyteller and as an embrace, implicating my loved ones in the artworks. 

While the focus of the World Weather Network is climate change, we interpreted weather more widely to consider the microclimate of wherever we were at that specific moment in time, which often led to channeling histories and stories—personal and what might be not so personal—through artists’ writings. As artists, we invent structures that allow us to be entangled with particular catastrophes, places, and bodies. We need paradigms of making that can restore the catastrophe as a transformative state and not as a rupturing event: If and when we can claim catastrophe as a state—not a moment—of transformation, our making-paradigms will necessarily shift. 

I think over the last year and a half, we have become invested in making work that deals with the unspeakable nature of constant and imminent catastrophe that we find ourselves in. Catastrophe is the air we breathe in. That disentangling of catastrophes—separating them, isolating them to make it seem like only that one thing is wrong—becomes a form of habituation. We need to remain entangled, to sit with it. This thinking has led us to stay committed to asking the artists to lead the way. 

Özge: Following the artists, we see that their studios can become the ultimate weather stations. In “Is There Any Snow?” Burcu Yağcıoğlu talked about how she tries to find consolation in hosting Pseudomonas syringae—the bacteria used for production of artificial snow—in her fridge as she struggles to process the major changes in weather patterns in her hometown of Bolu in Turkey. In “Tying Together the Text Between Two Doors,” Yasemin Nur narrated an account about her home/studio ritual where she collects, dries, and places flowers in boiling water and places sheets of paper in the water to soak up the color, relaying a tension between ephemerality, documentation, and abstraction. In “Daredevil.” İz Öztat invited the reader to her temporary studio where she plays with wool, ropes, parchments, and found materials to create sculptures that evoke desire and a sense of flight, confronting the state of not knowing. All these artists convey their own artistic strategies to cope with change and uncertainty.

I’m attracted to artists’ writings that are personal, don’t claim a moral high ground, insist on storytelling, and seek vocabularies to process change, uncertainty, and disaster. In “When Does Orange Become Red,” Elmas Deniz pointed out that we actually don’t know enough about what the weather is like now: we simply try to freeze moments and analyze fragments, being unable to grasp all the moving parts. She argues that we need a new epistemology about weather and ecosystems—things that are constantly in motion. She asks: “Is the river separate from the plants and stones in its bed? Is it just water? Is rain just the water between the cloud and the ground? What does it turn into when it falls to the ground?”

Merve: I echo Elmas’s sentiment or demand for a new epistemology for a simple reason: If not now, when? One of the key realizations that I’m still struggling with is that catastrophe necessarily and definitely decimates language and creative reflections can settle into that ongoing state of decimation produced by catastrophe. Are the cracks of language around catastrophe the new epistemology? Is our struggle with this project a symptom or a necessary precondition of working with locality at this moment? 

Commissioning new works is always tricky, but especially so when there is a larger social rubric that the project needs to fit into. I was humbled by how much each artist revealed of their particular circumstances, be it loss, mourning, waiting, expecting, fleeing, flying, or aching. In this sense, the project has made me consider weather stations as artists pricking up their ears, their eyes, their senses to tune into where they are. I think there is something very valuable in activating this kind of embedded knowledge.

Özge: There is a wide variety of artistic strategies that deal with climate change. There are works that document the impacts of climate change; that ask for direct action from viewers; that record related social movements; and works that are critical of infrastructures of contemporary art and their desire to grow, pointing at our own complicity in the climate crisis (here I’m thinking of our friend Eray Çaylı’s book, Climate Aesthetics, 2020). 

Artists’ writings in our series, however, are not directly addressing the climate emergency. They take “weather reporting” as a prompt; they abstract it and turn it into personal and fragmented stories. Do you think that there is a risk that these writings might be construed as a form of defeatism or escapism?    

Merve: No, I don’t think so. We are committed to a sensibility, a way of being with the world. One of the first tenets of that sensibility—which has been clarified for me through this project—is precisely an insistence on holding space for experimentation: letting artists make a distinction on what they choose to create within a larger framework, tuning into their urgencies and localities, and more specifically, their studios and their processes of research, of getting lost in materialities. 

For example, Elmas has been working on environmental issues for more than a decade. Through this conversation with her, I was able to comprehend how an experience-based work can also be a direct intervention. Her 2020 video, A Conversation at the Isle of Mollusks, for instance, is anchored in childhood experiences, but she went back to not only make a video work of this conversation, but, I think, also to point to how different conversations and moments can be construed. Are we meant to have conversations about the climate emergency with each other or with mollusks? 

Özge: This question speaks to our interest in exploring the cracks of language around catastrophes. This idea is also central to “I am Anthus” by Özgür Demirci and Monica Papi. In their video, we see images of ecocide: toxic swamps, mining fields, and mega construction sites from across Turkey. Borrowed from Google Earth, the images take us for a bird’s-eye view journey. First we see the Earth, then zoom into a particular region, and then approach a site while keeping a distance. We start circling around the site, which evokes a sense of curiosity and anxiety. We move away and do the same gesture for other locations. Özgür’s images are coupled with Monica’s poem where the narrator is a pipit—a small passerine bird whose subspecies are called by the words “mountain,” “water,” “meadow,” and “tree” in Turkish. We hear: “I, an anthus of the mountains / I, an anthus of the rocks / I, an anthus of the water / Say my name / Because when none of this remains / My name will also be wiped.” The video is not simply about documenting sites of destruction and ecocide. It rather deals with ineffability—the difficulty to represent and process catastrophes through words and visuals.

Merve: Ineffability becomes a method in situations when catastrophes are intermingled, folding in on each other. Producing ineffable situations was one strategy through which some of the artists and writers worked with these ideas. The prompt of the “weather station” events triggered a cooperative way of being together as we asked artists to organize situations around what they needed in their practice at that moment. 

One of the most poignant moments of the last year for me was during Yasemin Nur and Can Aytekin’s workshop at the etching studio at Mimar Sinan University, which we organized for a small group of artists in December 2022. While we talked about the pedagogical and cooperative space of that atelier within the larger institutional framework over many decades, we also considered leaves and taking their imprint. This workshop was about how we define and share knowledge as we spent time with knowledge that the non-human collects and passes on—and leaves are one such entity. I don’t remember the last time I spent so much time looking at a leaf, but I now take care to do this more often in order to relate to my surroundings.

Özge: Yasemin’s and Can’s event shows a shared sensibility across all the artists we invited to this project. They organized gatherings with small groups of people, either in the form of conversations or workshops, based on the urgencies in their practice. You and İz held reading groups, looking at ideas of locality and mourning. Özgür and Monica organized poetry readings near a gold mine, on the edge of a grove of trees. Burcu staged a lecture-performance in which she invited viewers to witness the real-time movements of the bacteria that she has been conducting research about.

Writer wing chan pushed the idea of an “event” even further. First, we published her text, “weather forecasting lake,” where she narrated a story about how her body learns, remembers, and predicts the weather elements that surround her homes. Then, wing invited Kiều-Anh Nguyễn to write about her prompt of “body as weather station” and penned a postscript that unfolds an imaginary journey that she took to the alley where Kiều-Anh’s grandmother lived in Hanoi. The one-on-one conversation transformed into this journey, this event recorded through words.   

I believe that the small-scale and intimate format of all these events is symptomatic of something that this group of artists are seeking these days. On the one hand, we have individual artists producing their own works and sharing them with large groups of people. On the other hand, there is a need for—and a shift towardmore intimate groups and the idea of cultivating things together. For me, this is a tension that art institutions experience as well. We’ve been thinking about modes of working that strike a balance between large-scale, visible, publicly accessible events and small-scale, lesser-visible, safe spaces of building things together. 

Merve: As such, how we choose to navigate producing cooperative, collaborative social spaces become crucial as well. Our perception of disaster evolves with and in relation to each other. I feel the need to set up such spaces and I was thrilled that all the contributors we invited thought with us about what organizing an event meant for them at that moment. 

With everyone we invited, we asked them to consider what their practice needed at that moment, and this range of activities—from small-scale gatherings around readings to making etchings to poetry readings and lecture-performances—reveals that reporting is not an individual enterprise. The events became acts of attunement, as artists and writers produced a dramaturgy of sociality that was inspired, but not necessarily defined, by their published contribution. This potential tension or difference reveals artistic practice as a shifting, dynamic, and most importantly, shared space. 

I think the events and the published contributions were more intertwined than we first realized. As I revisit the texts that we published, I see that they all function like a game of tag, as the artists transformed an introversion into an extroversion, an expression, a passing on. In other words, they not only shared something of their process and where they were at in the moment, and also a methodology of how to be together in that space. The contributions ooze into each other, and this feels like a shared act of having our ears to the ground. 

Click here for a full list of all the published contributions and related events.