A linear story about a circular phenomenon

Weather Report from the Vitsaniemi weather station

If you live in a living place, in a relationship with everything around you. At last you begin to see, at last you begin to hear. 

You learn to see signs and patterns in the living things around you. You can tell from the clouds, the trees, or the river what weather is coming tomorrow or next season. You begin to get to know the different winds, their characteristics and what they bring with them. You learn to decipher the different forms of snow, and in the entrails of fish you can predict the weather.  

Until the early 20th century, weather forecasting was not seen as a science but as magic. Today, weather forecasts are a daily feature along with the news. The weather has many guises and changes with the seasons. 

Thanks to weather data, we no longer have to be as observant. It can sometimes also be difficult to  be observant as the seasons are no longer as predictable as they once were. If you look up during  an evening around St. Michael's Day, the Milky Way can tell you what winter will be like.  

At the weather station, we chose to share a story about a relationship, the one between the man and the river. We have shaped this according to the paradigms that prevail here, around the transmission of knowledge. Through crafts and storytelling. 

We started carving a weather map out of a tree trunk. Inspired by the Inuit in Greenland, where they used to carve maps out of driftwood to help navigate along the coastline, they were never made bigger than they could fit in a mitten to be able to easily retreive the map out at sea.  

The weather map in Vitsaniemi is monumental in size. 

In the weather map there are inscriptions on how to interpret signs to predict the weather. Techniques used for many generations before us. Knowledge that fewer and fewer possess. Here we follow the river, with the current, through eight seasons.  

To the untrained eye, our map looks more like a coffee stick or a wooden sculpture. The cartography we have today is two-dimensional with lines and/or color codes to be able to read it. The maps we see today are also a product of colonialism. Partly how they are drawn, what is centered, that there is up and down and wrong proportions.  

The story we want to leave behind us is about getting to know your surroundings. For each day we have removed material from the log and the contours of the map have begun to grow into the story of the river and the seasons as a road. A linear story of a circular phenomenon.  

Johdet Pirak

Johdet Pirak is an artist duo with their roots in Norrbotten's hinterland. Their practice is rooted in their cultural heritage and a rural life in the north where a tradition of storytelling is central.  Art is a way for tradition to progress and develop. As much as modern subcultures has nurtured  their way of working, so has their Tornedalian and Sami heritage.

Find out more about Kunsthall Tornedalen and the Tornio Valley weather station, here.