On April 11, FEELed Lab Director Astrida (that’s me!) teamed up with the UBC Centre for Climate Justice and our friends at the Belkin Gallery at UBC Vancouver to present Smoke Forecast – a one day symposium to mark the close of Structure of Smoke, a show that had been curated by Tania Willard and Melanie O’Brien, running at the Belkin since the beginning of the year. (Read more about that exhibition here. An iteration of this exhibition is now also on view at the FINA gallery at UBCO!)
With registration over capacity and long waitlist, we were excited to offer a day of conversation and engagement with wildfire, centring many perspectives that we do not hear from often enough in fire-prone BC: artists, writers, poets, musicians – many of whom have had first-hand experience of wildfire in recent years. Check out the full program of the symposium here.
For my part, I had the pleasure of organizing “Forest Weathering” – a walkshop! As I write in chapter 9 of How to Weather Together: Feminist Practice for Climate Change:
Stranger intimacy, as Berlant teaches us, can be a bit awkward and ‘glitchy’, but walkshops can serve as a ‘training’ in glitchy ambivalence. One of the great things about walkshops is the way mobility – moving through space together – lets that awkward glitchiness work itself out, at least partially. A walkshop is a moving line but it is never a precise and perfect one. It is a bit mumbled and jumbled. One body slows down, and others bunch up in the back. A couple of bodies veer off to pet a cat, or use the toilet, and rejoin in a new formation. This pattern without predictability (like weather) means that moving alongside others is mostly about giving yourself over to the agency of the moving line itself…
Forest Weathering began just outside of the gallery, with a heartfelt and personal welcome from Musqueam artist and activist sχɬemtəna:t St’agid Jaad Audrey Siegl. Then, following an invitation to the group to get to know one another by sharing memories of a significant tree in our lives, participants were tasked with carrying water (a small archive of snow) and fire (a flame of remembrance) with us, as our group departed the gallery, walking slowly and thoughtfully (“as if our feet were ears,” after the late great Pauline Oliveros) towards a cedar forest a few hundred meters away.
Entering the forest, the sounds, smells and feelings shifted. We were greeted by musician and sound artist Ruby Singh, who invited us to listen to the bioacoustics of the forest around us – interspersed with whispered poetic confessions, lyric declarations, and a few beats to boot, offered by Ruby, Audrey, and poet Elee Kraljii-Gardiner.
After continuing to wind through the cedars, Elee gathered us in a tiny opening in the trees for a hylofeminist meditation: feeling and imaganing ourselves with the forest, the ground, the weather they sky.
We returned the water and fire, carried carefully by all, to the universe.
Special thanks to Tania and Melanie at the Belkin, Amy Harris at the CCJ, as well as to Audrey, Ruby and Elee for helping conceptualize the walk. Thanks to Karen, Jana, Dawn and everyone else who helped out on the day.
Funding for this event was provided by PICS: Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions.
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