OBSERVATORY OF PRECIPITATION

Precipitation is a word that seeks to convey a multitude of meteorological and phenomenological processes: weather that is felt and seen falling from the sky.

Observatory of Precipitation is a collection of illustrated weathers brought to life by artist Feifei Zhou; translations of memories belonging to a group of London poets, each inspired by words in one of their nine different languages.

Can weather and everything we associate with it be captured in words or images?

Visit the collection of nine illustrated memories at observatoryofprecipitation.com (best experienced on mobile using headphones).

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PATHETIC FALLACIES: A CONVERSATION ABOUT WEATHER, LANGUAGE AND MEMORY WITH FEIFEI ZHOU, JESSICA J LEE AND ALDER KELEMAN

To mark the launch of Observatory of Precipitation, this conversation brings together the artist Feifei Zhou with poet and environmental historian Jessica J Lee, and anthropologist Alder Keleman, to discuss how our understanding of weather is structured by language and culture.

Is the weather a social or personal experience? Can it be communicated and translated through words and images? And, in light of climate change, how might our own memories diverge from the weather we come to expect?

Speakers:

Feifei Zhou is a Chinese-born spatial and visual designer. She is a co-editor of the digital publication Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford University Press, 2021). Her work explores spatial, cultural, and ecological impacts of the industrialised built and natural environment. Using narrative-based spatial analysis, she collaborates intensively with social scientists to translate empirical observations and scientific research into visual representations that aim to both clarify intricate more-than-human relations and open new questions. She has taught architecture at Columbia GSAPP, Cornell AAP and Central Saint Martins.

Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, the Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of two books of nature writing, Turning and Two Trees Make a Forest, and co-editor of the essay collection Dog Hearted. She has a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics and was Writer-in-Residence at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology in Berlin from 2017–2018. Jessica is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge.

Alder Keleman Saxena is Assistant Professor of Environmental Anthropology and Sustainable Food Systems at Northern Arizona University. An environmental anthropologist, her research has examined the relationships linking agricultural biodiversity to human food cultures in Mexico and Bolivia, drawing connections between locally specific ethnobotanical and biocultural practices and larger political-economic contexts. Her more recent research and writing explores the social and material implications of digital connectivity for geographically remote spaces. Alder is a co-editor of Feral Atlas: the More-Than-Human Anthropocene.

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CREDITS

Observatory of Precipitation was commissioned by Artangel for the World Weather Network.

Artistic Direction & Animation: Feifei Zhou
Web Development: The Workers
Sound Design: House of Noise
Produced by Artangel

The Poets:

Jessica J Lee
Leo Boix
Marta Dziurosz
Nikhat Hoque
Ayça Türkoğlu
Nina Mingya Powles
Iris Colomb

A Thousand Words for Weather

Observatory of Precipitation takes inspiration from A Thousand Words for Weather, a multilingual dictionary of weather words conceived by writer Jessica J Lee and created in collaboration with eight other poets (all of whom contributed interviews to The Observatory of Precipitation - credited above). The dictionary was previously reimagined as a sonic installation at Senate House Library from 22 June 2022 to 25 March 2023.

Commissioned by Artangel as part of their London weather station.