‘In dreams begins responsibilities’ W B Yeats
Recently when I was talking about the International Polar Year, and how they only happen every fifty years, someone joked that it might be last one. Like all good jokes, it provokes some serious questions. Will the polar regions exist as identifiable and distinct regional geography in fifty years time? What will have happened to the landscape and people of the Arctic? Given the changes that have already happened in the last 5-10 years, it is hard to imagine what the arctic might be like in fifty years. The latest climate models tells us the news is not good, no summer sea ice by 2050. As changes in the biophysical world accelerate, culturally we try to make sense of this change. One impetuous that I am interested in has been the impetuous to “archive” as a way of trying to confront a sense of loss at the extinction and disappearance of much flora and fauna. Much of these archiving impulses attempt to categorise, capture and represent that which is disappearing. But archives can be as much about the future as the past, as we see in the valuable ice core archives of climatic histories, that allow us a generative look at the future. We can imagine that if we changed the demands of the archive and the achievable we might get some very different artefacts and objects of knowledge. In my project on the “Ice Archives: Curating Climate Change” I have been interested in thinking about what kind of other archives might expand our creative imaginings of different climate futures. To that end, I have been thinking about the imaginative and physical work of ‘making sense’ and ‘thinking with’ such an array of political, media, everyday perceptual phenomena is a process of Knowledge formation in its own right: that is, it is a messy form of ‘together-work’ of thinking about climate change and building Knowledge around this flow of images, information, exhibits, data and events. Collaboration is at the centre of this. One of the ways I have been trying to work this out in practice is with my collaborator Jennifer Gabrys, on a joint project “Weather Permitting” (www.weatherpermitting.org) where we are proposing to build a number of weather gardens based on understanding of future and past climate change.

-- KathrynYusoff