*This event has been rescheduled to Wednesday 5 February, please register for a ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/reading-the-winds-performance-lecture-tickets-89995873079

“I’ve always considered the weather to be an underestimated topic.”

Roland Barthes (1)

Associate Producer Alison Scott will present two events that mark the first phase of her ongoing research project Can we talk about the weather?.

For Reading the winds, Alison will present a performance lecture creating a new and speculative narrative connecting the historic architecture on Calton Hill and the “world’s first weather station”; the Tower of the Winds in Athens, Greece.

Can we talk about the weather? proposes Collective as a weather observatory. Since it was founded, the City Observatory site has been used to look outward at the world around us: to monitor the movement of the stars, the temperature of the earth and refine our reading of time. Like time-keeping, Alison is using the idea of weather-keeping as a process of monitoring and recording the weather, both amateur and professional, to help us reconsider how we relate linguistically, culturally and emotionally to the rapidly changing world around us.

To date, Can we talk about the weather? has focused on the contexts of weather reading from the individual to the corporate, where institutional readings of the weather are steeped in the ideologies of capitalism, empire and class. In these initial events she will ask us to question: Whose weather is being read and for whom?

These two events are an invitation to participate in thinking and talking about the weather as both a personal, embodied experience, and at the same time as a globalised system. During the events, participants will explore key texts and art works where; the body can become a barometer; weather is an analogy for systemic racial oppression, or; a metaphor for how to reconfigure our relationship to the planet in the midst of climate change.

Alison’s research will continue to develop beyond these events, with outcomes for Can we talk about the weather? made public late 2020.

For more information regarding access click here, or get in touch via mail@collective-edinburgh.art or 0131 556 1264.

Alison Scott is a Glasgow based artist and writer who often works with other artists. Her work is research-led and driven by interests in expanded performance and writing practices, and speculative approaches to knowledge production. Alison recently completed the MLitt in Art Writing at Glasgow School of Art. Recent presentations and residencies have taken place at Glasgow Women’s Library (2019), The Poetry Club (2019), Glasgow Project Room (2018), Inverness Museum and Art Gallery (2017), Timespan (2017), Edinburgh Art Festival (2017). Alison was a committee member at Generator Projects (2014-16) and graduated from Art, Philosophy and Contemporary Practices at DJCAD, Dundee, (2014).

Part of Collective’s Satellites Programme. Satellites Programme is Collective’s development programme for emergent artists and producers based in Scotland. The 2019-20 Participants are: Alison Scott, Kirsty Hendry, Sulaïman Majali, Holly McLean and Becky Šik.

1) Roland Barthes, The Preparation of The Novel, trans. Kate Briggs (Columbia University Press 2011) p39

Image: Joan Jonas, Wind, 1968. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York