When you talk about the weather, what do you refer to? Do you recognize when you breathe in the weather is in you as you are in the weather? “Loss of bounded self is only truly horrifying within an anthropocentric framework that prizes human being in its current state over all other forms and ways of being. Self-annihilation might, paradoxically, offer a path toward ecosystemic preservation.“ (Elvia Wilk, Death by Landscape) According to Daisy Hildyard every human has two bodies, one that eats, sweats, cries, fucks, and grieves… and one ecosystemic body, that connects us beyond the individual self, with other countries, rivers, bodies, weathers. Climate change makes us aware of this unsettling waver between ourselves and the world. In this class we will engage with rain, a liquid that shapes, and connects all matter, weaving the local with the planetary, the first with the second body. While we investigate our relationship with geological forces amid climate breakdown, we will explore how collective publishing practices can open up new ways of being and knowing. In our daily lives, weather images are conveyed through simulations and originate from machine perspectives rather than human ones portraying a supposedly complete access to Earth. This synthetic weather reaches us daily through digital forecasts and forms the backdrop of our interactions with the atmosphere mediated by information technologies. Connecting us with possible futures, ends of worlds as we know them, and colonial and modernist infrastructures of desires of control. Here, technology forms a loop that not only mediates our relationship with the weather but also profoundly influences how we perceive and relate to ourselves. During two weeks we will transform the dinner table into a space to explore weather patterns. Treating the table as a medium and interface, we will engage with weather data through collective acts of cooking, eating, and digestion. Asking questions such as: How do the stories we tell shape our relationship with the landscapes and climates around us? In what ways do our digital interactions with weather influence our perception of what is called “nature”? We will create a temporary community and investigate the publication as a holder, a carrier bag for relational knowledge. Here, we see publishing as a relational space-making practice and a means of situated knowledge production, involving audiences in making information public and critically examining knowledge systems and information politics.

When you talk about the weather, what do you refer to? Do you recognize when you breathe in the weather is in you as you are in the weather? “Loss of bounded self is only truly horrifying within an anthropocentric framework that prizes human being in its current state over all other forms and ways of being. Self-annihilation might, paradoxically, offer a path toward ecosystemic preservation.“ (Elvia Wilk, Death by Landscape) Daisy Hildyard suggests that each human possesses two bodies: one that eats, sweats, cries, loves, and grieves, and another, an ecosystemic body, that connects us beyond the confines of our individual selves to other countries, rivers, bodies, waste, and weathers. Climate change disrupts our understanding of the boundary between ourselves and the world, making us keenly aware of this oscillation. What practices, tactics, and tricks can help us integrate these two bodies, providing emotional support as we navigate these disconcerting shifts? In this course, we will explore the poethics and politics of storytelling in feminist text production, examining prose, poetry, and theory. Through an eclectic range of writings, we will investigate the roles of bodies and landscapes, figure and ground. We will explore how these writings challenge and shift modernist narratives that separate bodies and impose control over the so-called “nature,” turning our view towards a more relational, and indeed, weirder understanding of the self. Our readings will span hydrofeminist, new materialist, queer, and Black feminist perspectives. We will ask questions such as: How can feminist writing practices foster different understandings of landscapes, places, environments, and ultimately, of ourselves? How can we understand writing and reading as a relational practice that creates a structure for feminist environmental ethics within the classroom and beyond? What methods can we invent to bridge the gap between individual experience and collective ecological consciousness? What narrative strategies can help us shift a modernist self-understanding and foster different modes of desire, relationality, and care? The pace of this class will be deliberately slow, allowing us to engage deeply with the texts. This intentional tempo will provide space for more embodied and artistic interaction with both writing and readings, to make connections between theoretical insights and our creative practices.