Writing ‘Life Notes Instead of Suicide Notes’: Three Conversations and a Sound Installation

The installation project was conceived and developed by environmental historian and author, Jessica J. Lee. She worked with a multilingual team of poets and translators, encouraging them to express the sensory experience of weather in a selection of key words that focused individual experience and thus made it shareable. The same team then translated these words into and between various languages, and in this way increased that shareability in multiple ways. With sound artist Claudia Molitor joining the team, the project was further expanded to building on the multilingual treasure chest of words and interpreting it by transforming it into abstract sound. The result is the installation that is currently available to viewers in Senate House Library, floors 4, 5 and 6, and that blends information on climate change – in the form of codified knowledge, i.e. scientific books presenting historical and current knowledge on weather events and their experience – with the more visceral, affective experience of the soundscape hovering in the Library space and accompanying the reading process. Very deservedly, the installation received a rave review when it opened in June this year, the Observer’s Laura Cumming calling it ‘mesmerisingly subtle’.

The conversations hosted by SAS and Artangel around this project in the summer and autumn this year deepened the interdisciplinary aspect of the work, and the awareness that it is via different aspects of knowledge production – scientific, experiential, and creative – that we can gain a more profound understanding of what weather and climate mean to us and how we can develop new ways of thinking. 

The first of these conversations took place on 21 July, when Michael Morris of Artangel invited author Jeanette Winterson to speak with Professor Friederike Otto of Imperial College, London, one of the leading international specialists in Climate Science.

Jeanette Winterson, a writer who has always been profoundly engaged with the social reality we live in, with issues of gender, of artificial intelligence and climate change, was perfectly placed to draw out, discuss and contextualise Otto’s work on extreme weather events. At the heart of their conversation was the urgent question of how to act rapidly, and with scientific precision in the face of environmental change – a question that is at least partly addressed by the World Weather attribution initiative, co-founded by Otto: the initiative is designed to overcome the time-lag caused by lengthy scientific peer-reviewing systems, and provides robust assessments on the role of climate change in the aftermath of weather events such as droughts, heat waves and storms. A recording of the conversation is available at the World Weather Network.

Two further events were co-convened by Jessica J. Lee, Artangel and the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (ILCS) in September and October this year.

The first, a round-table discussion entitled Weather in Translation, Time, Place, and Sound, took place on 29 September and brought together (almost all of) the creators of A Thousand Words for Weather. Jessica J. Lee was joined by poets and translators Izdihar Alodhami, Leo Boix, Iris Colomb, Marta Dziurosz, Nikhat Hoque, Ayça Turkoglu, and sound artist Claudia Molitor. Having collaborated in times of the pandemic and thus worked exclusively online so far, this was the first time the team actually came together in a room. The face-to-face meeting gave the event an extra intensity and provided fascinating insights into the background of the project. Among other points, questions very close to the heart of ILCS were explored: questions around the choice of words included in the ‘multilingual dictionary’ of weather, of how to translate seemingly untranslatable words, of the fluidity between words and ‘pure’ sound, and how the ‘shareability’ of weather experience across language, space and time could be further enhanced. The podcast of the event is available to view online here.

The third event in the series was a reading and conversation on 26 October, featuring four women authors whose work explores the embodied experiences of weather in various climatic zones. Coming together to discuss Weather, Words, and the Body were Polly Atkin, JR Carpenter, Jean McNeil, and Amanda Thomson, and the event was chaired by Jessica J. Lee.

Polly Atkin, an intrepid all-weather swimmer living in the Lake District kicked off with a short reading that movingly focused attention on the interaction between the body and the environment and on the very sensations involved in this interaction. The multi-media artist J.R. Carpenter then read from her poetry collection This is a Picture of Wind. The rhythm and cadences of her sentences evoked the body being buffeted by weather – listening to the author’s nuanced reading performance turned into a visceral, almost entrancing experience.

Jean McNeil, prolific author and Director of the Creative Writing programme at UEA, gave an insight into her Ice Diaries (2016), written following a writer-in-residence stint at the British Antarctic Survey. Her text brought home what it means to test the limits of human endurance of the cold. Amanda Thomson focused attention on the capacity of language to capture the nuances of weather, introducing the audience to an array of words, some onomatopoeic, some arcane, some puzzling, some immediately accessible. Most of these words have fallen out of regular use – but the need to collect, savour and save this vocabulary to enhance our ability to talk about weather, climate, and climate change was evident to all listeners.  

Addressing closely related themes and concerns, these readings and the ensuing conversation impressed most by making the audience aware of the differences and the sheer range of possibilities in narrative strategies and aesthetic approaches that the writers use to make us share their experiences – listening to them was both a moving and a joyful experience. The podcast of the event can be accessed online here.

This last, like the other two events, remind us not only to focus on capturing and communicating human experience, an endeavour at the heart of the humanities, but also on expanding the ways in which we explore and join up the varied, multiple knowledges, methodologies, and expressions of this experience. A small exhibition curated by Senate House Library to accompany the Thousand Words for Weather sound installation emphasises this point further, as it decentres Eurocentric perspectives on the weather. One exhibit, for instance, is a handmade cartonera book from Mexico: Fidel Velasco's Tiempo de Cielos Bebidos (Time of Drunken Skies), of 2012. The page on which it is open contains a poem whose title translates as “The insects and the children coexist in the streams left by the downpour”. Cartoneras, named after the waste pickers (cartoneros) who supply the cardboard (cartón) for making them, is a grassroots publishing movement born out of Argentina’s economic crisis in 2001. Bringing together literary and artistic practice and community activism, hundreds of cartonera publishers are today spread across and beyond Central and South America, creating accessible and sustainable books which give voice to those most affected by the climate crisis.

In We Are the Weather (2019), another book that is displayed as part of the installation in Senate House, Jonathan Safran Foer reminds us that the experience of climate is a communal experience; and from this, he argues, a communal task must result: to write ‘life notes instead of suicide notes’. ‘We must do this together’, he concludes: ‘everyone’s hand wrapped around the same pen, every breath of everyone exhaling the shared prayer. […] Thus, we shall make a home together.’

Professor Godela Weiss-Sussex, Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, School of Advanced Study