The Community Weathering Station at Black Gully Festival

The Community Weathering Station is a market stall about climate change. This black gully festival we have a program of visiting artist-researcher facilitated workshops that link up with the themes of weathering: a concept that explores climate change from a grounded, localised and embodied perspective.

Throughout the day we will also offer Tea/Tarot readings when the readers are in, and there will be other little things in the stall to look at and discuss. For the workshops: We will endeavour to have all the materials you need on hand, but please read below for any specific instructions and to register to help us plan for numbers.

All Workshops begin at the CoWS Stall

• Stall opens 10am

Mixed Weathering Workshops 10-11am

Drop into the CoWS Stall and participate in a selection of activities “Lucky Dip”, “Close Meteorology”, “Speed Zining” and “Weathering With and Without”. These games are connected to How to weather together exhibition in the gallery and book of the same name. Participants can take home their contributions or they can add it to the exhibition upstairs. These activities are all designed to engage with yourself and each other differently and carefully in relation to everyday weather, but also as a method for connecting to the large scale catastrophe of climate change. If you miss the early workshop options to participate will be available throughout the day.

We believe weathering well requires the proliferation of feminist, queer and anticolonial environmentalisms and the global redistribution of shelter and vulnerability. To assist in grass-roots revolutionary mobilisation, we offer up simple practices as part of a larger historical movement: to change the climate of climate change and be ourselves changed in the process.

Facilitator Bio/s: The weathering workshops are facilated by Tessa Zettel (Sydney), Astrida Neimanis (Canada) and Jennifer Hamilton (Armidale). These three have been collaborating for a decade as The Weathering Collective.

• FREE REGISTRATION // 10-11am.

Rest your identity: 11-12

With Ju Bavyka

This workshop leans on meditation practices to examine our relationships to aspects of our identity, including habits or social roles, that get overworked in everyday life. This overwork can be a response to social injustice, patriarchy, gendered roles, being disabled, or to the self-exploitation of one’s ethnic and cultural background in order to exist and survive. After a short introduction, participants are invited to follow a guided meditation and to identify parts of themself that require a little rest, revision, and kind reintegration on better terms. A space for encounter and possible connection is created during the discussion afterwards. This workshop is included in the CoWS program as a practice that allows for new openings to the weather world.

Cushions provided.

Facilitator Bio: Ju is a visual artist, writer and community organiser. They create from a queer, forager perspective and are interested in practices of hospitality and generosity. Ju lives, works and rests on unceded Gadigal Wangal lands in so-called Sydney, Australia, and sometimes in Berlin. They have ties to Kazakhstan and Germany through their birth, education, community connections and family history. 

• FREE REGISTRATION (Please RSVP to help with numbers, but please also show up on the day either way)

15 Max

• 12pm Welcome to Country (Mainstage) 

DAY FOR IT! why we love good weather 12.30-1.30pm

With Blanche Verlie

Most of our efforts to communicate the importance of global heating focus on how scary and bad changing the climate is. But a lot of people find it too scary to think about, and so they disengage from the topic. What if we celebrated all the benefits that a safe climate affords us? This walkshop riffs on the Australian idiom “Day for It!” that celebrates all the great, fun things we can do in good weather and who those activities allow us to be, to help us clarify the cultural and personal value of our Holocene climate. 

What you’ll need to participate: a phone with a camera and internet connection OR a pen and paper. We’ll be walking around the Festival and chatting to people about what their favourite weather is, and why they love it. 

Facilitator Bio: Blanche is a multidisciplinary social scientist whose work focuses on climate change working. Her research investigates how people understand, experience, and respond to climate change, and how we might do this differently and better. Her book Learning to live-with climate change: From anxiety to transformation is available as a free e-book. At the University of Sydney, she is a Sydney Horizon Fellow in Gender and Cultural Studies, and one of the leaders of the Environmental Justice theme at the Sydney Environment Institute

• FREE REGISTRATION (Please RSVP to help with numbers, but please also show up on the day either way)
• 1.30-2.30 Lunch break (& Rocky Bottom Girls playing on mainstage!)

Learn to Scry with the Sky: how to prophesize through gazing, 2.30-3.30pm

With Nina Vroeman

This workshop will explore exercises from Horizon Factory’s publication Deep Gazing.

The book is a guide, a tool, an atlas and a companion for individual and communal attunement to the environment. Opening to the expansiveness of the sky, learning to read its signs and traces, and allowing for messages and meanings to arise beyond the art of forecasting. 

Facilitator Bio: Nina makes interdisciplinary work about ecology that is speculative and embodied. They live in Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal), on the traditional territory of the Kanien’kehà:ka and are a recent MFA graduate from Sculpture and Ceramics at Concordia University. For more information about their work visit https://ninavroemen.com/

• FREE REGISTRATION (Please RSVP to help with numbers, but please also show up on the day either way)
• 15 Max
• Stall closes 4pm