Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Many creative practitioners seek new ways to articulate and collectively cope with rising weather turbulence. Sound-orientated artworks enable intimate listening with the cyclonic winds and heated atmosphere across Te Moana Nui a Kiwa, the Southern Pacific Ocean. This paper focuses on two artworks from Aotearoa New Zealand as active translators of unruly Twenty-First Century weather. The collaborative artwork Koea ō Tāwhirimatea - Weather Choir (Breath of Weather collective, 2022-2023), and MĀKŪ, te hā o Haupapa: Moisture, the breath of Haupapa (Bull, Randerson, Shearer et al. 2022-2024) are catalysts for eco-poetic activism, pulling in ancient cosmologies of wind and weather. They attune and amplify our perceptions of meteorological forces. Indigenous (Moana, Polynesian) names for the winds, harmonic and aharmonic sound recordings offer alternative modalities of representation to scientific quantification or televised spectacle. This paper builds on my experience as curator and artist in the World Weather Network (WWN), a distributed online network for artists, performers and writers to share their many weathers. The WWN web and mobile platform convenes artists’ ‘Weather Reports’ (including the aforementioned artworks), enabling concepts to travel amongst a network of 28 small arts organisations from disparate continents and archipelagos. The research draws on Anthropologist Tim Ingold’s sense of co-mingling with the environment (2007), echoing Michel Serres (1985) philosophy of mingled bodies. I suggest that this sense of embodied being with the weather resonates with Māori concepts of environmental ancestry (Marsden 2003). Artists’ cultural instruments sensorially voice the wind, letting it be, unsettling the primacy of human phenomenological experience.