Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

A Tarot of the Weather is a dynamic archive that challenges dominant narratives of place in a period of ecological crisis. As a tool for generating community conversations about climate change, it has the power to help nurture cultural resilience. I invite you to participate in a group reading.

Paper long abstract

A Tarot of the Weather is a set of subverted 24 Major Arcana cards. A card reading can seem random and beyond our control. Similarly, the weather can seem random and beyond our control. I present the Tarot of the Weather as a dynamic archive that both sustains and challenges dominant narratives of place in a period of ecological crisis. As a tool for generating real-time community conversations about climate change, it has the power to help nurture cultural resilience.

This pack assumes that our bodies are sensory data collectors. This pack embodies the entanglement of nature and culture, and when used by groups in real time the archive becomes co-constructed. The deck includes some new, wild cards. The pack also includes some Scottish words for different sorts of weathers, a strategy for anchoring this work in place, as geo-located.

The images are from a collection of polaroid photographs that have been physically manipulated to echo the layers of experience that our bodies acquire through life, and evoking the traces within landscapes that allude to thousands of years of generational and multi-species interactions. The cards are circular. Rectangular cards give binary readings. Circular cards offer more nuance to a reading. This paper will focus on how using the Tarot of the Weather to generate community conversations around climate change constitutes a form of activism.