Forecast, the exhibition: Setting the scene

Forecast is a participatory exhibition situated in Gallery 09 at The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) curated by Lilly Blue in a collaboration with the Centre for People, Place and Planet’s Jo Pollitt and the WA Bureau of Meteorology, and featuring photo media artworks by Ballardong Noongar woman Dianne Jones and Eva Fernández of Spanish heritage. Jones and Fernández created larger than life photo media works including Sovereign Sisters in response to the concept of Staging Weather and these works on the walls curve around the two participatory works, Weather Patterns and Disappearing Forests (see Figures 1, and 2 and 3). Weather Patterns is an installation of ever-changing repetitions made with red triangles that travel across the felt stones and carpet-as-canvas. Representing ever-changing connections, atmospheres, currents, choreographic maps and meteorological markings these weather cartographies articulate ways of moving. The process of pressing the felt onto felt and floor is care-filled and patient. Tiny fingers tip triangles in and out of wooden boxes, alongside precisely designed installations. Disappearing Forests draws on First Nations concepts of environment as kin (Van Horn et al., Reference Van Horn, Kimmerer and Hausdoerffer2021; Kuperus, Reference Kuperus, Boublil and Ferrarello2023; Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Taylor, Perdrisat and Wooltorton2022). Participants are invited to imagine their own family trees as including actual trees and to recall and share stories of a tree they have a close relationship with. They then paint their tree onto the canvas using a paintbrush and water making a very definite and inky mark, which they slowly come to notice is evaporating until it has eventually disappeared altogether. Each disappearance makes room for being with feeling, sharing an experience of loss, as well as recognising the possibilities within artist practice, to imagine possible futures. The exhibition engenders and invites feelings of slowness, or slow feeling. Variously emergent, fleeting, staying, fading.

Figure 1.

Weather patterns. Forecast installation view, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2024. Photo: Louise Coghill.

Figure 2.

Disappearing forests. Forecast installation view, The Art Gallery of WA, 2024. Photo: Louise Coghill.

Figure 2. Long description

A group of children are engaged in painting at wooden easels set up in a spacious art gallery. The children are focused on their artwork. The gallery features large windows allowing natural light to fill the space. In the background, a large mural depicts a close-up of a person's face, adding an artistic ambiance to the setting. Other children and adults are also present, participating in the creative activity.

Lilly Blue: Emergent and unexpected encounters

The temperature inside AGWA is maintained at 21–23 degrees Celsius, and even though most materials like it colder, ultimately human tolerance and comfort is considered primary. Humidity and illuminance are environmentally controlled so highly sensitive materials maintain archival integrity for up to fifty years, but some surfaces care less. Institutional concern is enacted to protect State Art Collection works considering noticeable rates of change and the impact of luxe levels on ageing eyes. There are daily negotiations about how and when to care more, or less, for objects, for architecture, for environments, for timelines, for ideas, or for visitors. It is within this controlled institutional environment that natural light floods in unheeded to the most recent participatory all-ages exhibition, Forecast. Long shadows stretch across an orchestra of easels in the afternoon, soft felt stone furnishings invite rest and a slow approach to noticing and staying longer interrupts notably diminishing audience attention spans. The Gallery 09 methodology activates slippages within the institution between research, curatorial practice, exhibition design and audience participation – agitating institutional fixedness and advocating for deeply considered relational, emergent and collaborative processes.

Since November 2021, Gallery 09 at AGWA has been dedicated to durational multigenerational participatory exhibitions sitting alongside other central exhibition projects and increasingly receiving equivalent curatorial, research, design, budget and marketing considerations to any other major exhibition. The interactive exhibitions are curated as stand-alone year-long projects, rather than all-ages activities developed in response to other exhibition content. This shift in approach to collaborative curatorial practice inviting hands-on audience contribution requires ongoing institutional negotiation and transformation; identifying and questioning power structures; advocating for the redistribution of resources; developing, testing and ratifying new institutional procedures; creating opportunities for deeply relational emergent practice; and prioritising strategies that enable slower approaches to creative development. As Sara Ahmed writes, we learn about institutional structures from trying to transform them and “It is only practical effort to bring about transformation that allows the wall to be apparent” (Reference Ahmed2023, p. 17). At least with the walls more visible it is possible to orient in relation to them, circumvent, or bring them down, as Gergis urges above, to enable a different kind of generous and dialogic public gathering.Footnote ¹

Gallery 09 projects are designed in equal part as exhibition, studio, research laboratory and public gathering space proposing that in a world of increasing fracture, disconnect, separation and indifference, connection in public spaces is possible. Connection as an antidote to disconnection raises questions about who is connecting and to what – and how built environments, aesthetic considerations, public pedagogy and care create the conditions for public engagement and social impact.

Forecast is activated at all times by the Teaching Artists who bring their experience of studio practice to the concepts and materials of each exhibition. This emergent process relies on artists with an embedded understanding of materiality, open-endedness, dialogic approaches and adaptability. Gallery 09 Teaching Artists are trained in slow creative learning methodologies that engage embedded and implicit strategies to support social, emotional and wellbeing outcomes for participants of all ages. This approach invests significant resources into building the capacity of Teaching Artists to harness their practice in order to engage and impact audiences. Through studio-based techniques, creative learning pedagogies and interactive multidisciplinary approaches Teaching Artists create meaningful opportunities for participants to contribute to exhibitions and access their own creativity. Rather than relying solely on printed and online learning resources limited to curriculum outcomes, investing in Teaching Artists as a resource ensures adaptability, access and inclusion, and recognises the importance of a relational approach to creative learning.

The ways in which exhibition “content” is activated relies on audience participation and this unpredictability allows for meaningful, emergent and unexpected encounters. How each participant negotiates what is meaningful, in what ways, to whom and for what reasons, is still very much alive as a question. People walk in and are enamoured by the exhibition aesthetic without an understanding of the invisible processes that are taking place and in which they are participating. In this way, curator and theorist Irit Rogoff’s reading of the museum as an “odd space” resonates with the experience of Forecast:

A multiplicity of experiences

Figure 3.

Disappearing forests. Forecast installation view, The Art Gallery of WA, 2024. Photo: Louise Coghill.

Figure 3. Long description

A man and a child stand near two easels in a gallery with large windows overlooking greenery. The man, wearing a blue shirt and gray pants, smiles as he looks at the child. The child, wearing a patterned shirt and green pants, holds a paintbrush and faces a canvas with abstract black brushstrokes. The other easel holds a blank canvas. The gallery has a modern design with a carpeted floor.

Alexa Taylor: Feeling the feelings, sitting in Forecast

The tree my brush streaks is one from my childhood that I watched disappear in real life. I think of watching other trees disappear in the past months, in the longest gap in rainfall in south-west WA since records began;Footnote ² a street tree on the suburban street by my house; the patches of brown that appear on the hills as you drive up that used to be signs of bushfire and now could be either bushfire or disappearance through drought; hiking to the top of Mt Clare and the mountain-top being a rustle of brown dry leaves. I sit gazing at the painting of my tree, of paintings of other trees, of trees outside the window, of the mining-town backdrop in front of which the trees dance.

The acts of building weather patterns with my hands, of drawing another tree to watch fade, of staying-with to witness and watch and feel, hold a particular resonance. The gaze of the Sovereign Sisters over the exhibition permeates the space with presence and reminders of custodianship and as attention, care, noticing (Oliver et al., Reference Oliver, Hill and Bond2023). I am reminded that these acts of staying-with have agency despite not leaving a tangible trace. Around me are other bodies, other fading trees, different people caring for many small things. I feel a sense of collectivity, a looking-with and looking-in-relation-to, that expands my sense of care from the seemingly-too-small-to-do-anything individual. I get a sense of how this can stretch into a wider sense of time and space – small moments of developing cultures of care that are collective. I stay with the trees as they fade and feel the feelings that arise – but it does not feel quite as bleak as before.

Naomi Godden: Confronting and resisting extractivisms

Forecast resists the colonial urge to take souvenirs from Country by encouraging us instead to make paintings of trees – our kin, our relations, our memories of trees in everywhen. We paint alongside, overlapping and extending the trees of others that are slowly fading from the canvas. Hundreds of trees are painted every day on every canvas, and yet, ultimately, the canvases are blank. Our paintings are not captured or recorded, and we cannot take them home.

In November 2021, the Foreign Minister of Tuvalu, Simon Kofe, stood knee deep in the rising seas of his island and recorded an address to the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference (Cop26, 2021). Minister Kofe was dressed in the suit and tie of the coloniser – inappropriate for a 30-degree Celsius day at the beginning of the Pacific cyclone season – and he sweated under the hot sun. He spoke of the dire crisis of climate change for his people and appealed to colonial decision-makers for global solidarity and justice. The 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai had 85,000 attendees of whom 2,456 were fossil fuel lobbyists (Kick Big Polluters Out, 2023). Despite aims by the United Nations to prevent dangerous human interference in the climate system, it seems that 30 years of these conferences have become a co-opted space of bureaucratic climate violence.

In Forecast, the Sovereign Sisters in Dianne Jones and Eva Fernández’s portrait are wearing heavy black colonial dresses and sit on thrones. The young Noongar women are surrounded by trees, and water laps at their feet. One is wearing a crown. The young women are staunch and unflinching. They do not look uncomfortable, and they are not pleading to be heard. They exude defiance, power and cheek. They embody Chelsea Watego’s call to “fuck hope. be sovereign” Reference Watego(2021, p.131). In contrast, through the windows of the Forecast space we see the high-rise offices of extractive corporations such as BHP and Rio Tinto. These multinationals knowingly and determinedly harm Country, her people and her stories; an example being Rio Tinto’s 2020 destruction of 46,000+ year old rock shelters at Juukan Gorge, a significant cultural heritage site for the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples in Western Australia (Gudgeon & Stanley, Reference Stanley and Gudgeon2020). Under the gaze of these companies and the Sovereign Sisters, we are invited to engage in participatory practices of painting with magic canvas and sitting in circles to arrange red felt arrows as weather patterns.

Participation is a contested concept with contested practices. It ranges from information sharing and manipulation to relinquishing power to communities for self-determination. In critical participatory methods, social change occurs through the co-creation of knowledge and action (Cornish et al., Reference Cornish, Godoy-Etcheverry, Montoya, Swartz, White and Gillespie2023). This relies on relationality and resisting a desire to curate human interactions. Feminist and anti-colonial participation engenders care, solidarity, equity and inclusion and participatory processes are collective and community-led (Godden et al., Reference Godden, Sampson, Vasilevska, Denny, Bartolo and Farrelly2020). The methods of Forecast suggest an embrace of not-knowing, inviting open-ended responses to visual prompts and cues that generate conversations across difference and a grappling with the discomfort of thinking with changing weather on stolen land, while also in part relinquishing control of the experience and outcomes.

Recently, Western Australian media has been afire with statements that the 2024 summer in the south-west was the driest on record (Logan & Lynch, Reference Logan and Lynch2024). Indeed, we are all witness to the dying trees. But how shallow these colonial records are. Noongar Elders and scholars have documented the 10,000-year drought that occurred on Noongar Boodja between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age of the Pleistocene (Barrow & Robertson, Reference Robertson and Barrow2020). As a wadjela (non-Indigenous) woman, I do not have the capacity to imagine 10,000 years of drought. Boodja (Noongar Country) holds deep knowledge of Noongar survival, resistance and adaptation to weather conditions that are extremely difficult. Imagine if the international climate conferences were instead an interconnected network of place-based gatherings of 85,000 sovereign sisters from around the world, centring long knowledges to collectively confront the horror of the Capitalocene.

Leanda Mason: The pain(t)ing moment

Upon entering Forecast, it was difficult to miss the enormous portrait of three Aboriginal children sitting regally in colonial background. Their gazes were powerful and defiant. I found Sovereign Sisters stunning and engaging, but tinged with painful recognition of their need for resilience at such a young age. In another series of smaller portraits, there was further depiction of enduring struggle against displacement and cultural erasure, but this was offset by a romantic dance of two adults clearly in love, which, again, highlighted the necessary resilience of Aboriginal peoples. Seeing these representations of their determination to reclaim and preserve cultural heritage was inspiring and resonated with my own positionality as a fair-skinned Aboriginal person whose ancestors were purposefully assimilated through hateful racist and unethical policies.

Thinking about the exhibition as a whole, I reflected on the environmental impacts of colonisation on individuals and the fact that it was portrayed cleverly by using a painting rendered with water on canvas that mirrored the fleeting nature of existence. As the painted image evaporated before my eyes, the poignant symbolism of this process resonated deeply with me. I sketched a critically endangered trapdoor spider (my borangka; kin), an otherwise resilient species that survived for millions of years before ending up on the brink of disappearance due to very recent destructive colonial ideologies such as land-clearing and habitat loss. As I watched my painted image fade away when the canvas dried, it served as a stark reminder of the impermanence of life and the precariousness of all Country in the face of colonisation. I felt that my pain(t)ing moment encapsulated the profound loss experienced by me and others in the community losing connections to Country. I felt the urgent need to safeguard and reclaim cultural identity amidst ongoing challenges of rapid change and loss. As a space of slow feeling, Forecast deepened that sense of urgency, let it take root, breathe and expand.

Peggy Atkinson: Teleconnections and chaos

In forecasting, a teleconnection is the co-becoming of two scattered systems, absent from each other’s physical touch but intimately involved. These teleconnections are understood to span oceans. El Niño Southern Oscillation is one that connects us with the eastern Pacific. It acknowledges the way the warm current along the Chilean and Peruvian coastline which pushes the anchovies out to sea, is the same current that builds cold water alongside the east coast of so-called “Australia.” This cold water sucks the moisture from the air, dries our atmosphere to the bone and predisposes us to temperature extremes, fire, and, ultimately, drought, should the weather patterns choose.

Meanwhile, chaos is a state in our future, experienced by all of us in the everyday forecast. The interrelatedness of our natural world is so deep, no amount of computing power can possess its current state well enough to know its future state with certainty. As time passes, uncertainty grows, linearly at first and then non-linearly, surrendering to chaos. As a theory, chaos was the mathematical social revolution of the 1970s, ostracised by the mathematical elite for its bootleg belief in the absence of a pattern, and grudgingly accepted over time, as mathematical chaos, pathological chaos and biological chaos proved the rule (Gleick, Reference Gleick2011).

To consider Forecast as a meteorologist is to consider a more expansive story of teleconnections and chaos. The Sovereign Sisters’ gaze suggests we reconsider our forecast. It asks us to look for teleconnections between our past and present, to acknowledge the interconnectedness of the forecast with Australia’s fraught history. To question more deeply where “climate chaos” comes from. It asks which ships brought spring, summer, autumn and winter and imposed a foreign language and way of thinking on the six seasons described by the Noongar calendar: djilba, kambarang, birak, bunuru, djeran, makuru.

The story of this place, with its colonial history and legacy, is thinly veiled. The Spanish words we use for weather on Noongar Boodjar (El Niño, La Niña) point to the way ideas from many places have been taken to build Western meteorological practice. Indeed, the first daily forecast was published in a British newspaper in 1861 by a man named Robert FitzRoy, captain of the HMS Beagle: a ship better known for its naturalist and FitzRoy’s friend, Charles Darwin (Burton, Reference Burton1986). FitzRoy’s forecast was the result of skills he honed to ensure the safe passage of his ships through the Americas and Noongar Country alike. This story reminds me that the way I forecast is a language and a way of thinking developed for that purpose.

Spring means very little to the trees on Noongar Boodjar. They might know they are hurtling through space and located time; however, I doubt they think about the Gregorian calendar and note that it is sometime between the September equinox and December solstice. They are not about to drop their leaves in djeran and regrow them come kambarang. Kambarang means something more to the trees of this Country. Forecasting must be reimagined in the same way – as informed by First Nations knowledges and intimately (re)connected to Country. The exhibition was an opportunity to reflect as a meteorologist on how far up the Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River) we have sailed, how much further we can and cannot go, should and should not go, so that we might have more time before that nonlinear uncertainty.

Justine Dandy: On trees as kin

There is a big old gum tree in my street, a few doors down from my house, in someone’s backyard but clearly visible from the street – visible from blocks away, in fact. It is a survivor of the urban development of the area and it is magnificent, with a huge canopy of expansive branches. It is a resting spot for a family of red-tailed black cockatoos – karak – as they make their way from the river – bilya – to the Mt Lawley golf course, to feed. And it is a nesting spot and home for many other species; some visible to me, others not. Many living creatures co-exist within this tree’s bark, branches, leaves and the subterranean world of its roots. Like the cockatoos, I visit this tree, always stopping to gaze at it in awe when I am passing. It calls to me and I have gradually come to realise that I think of this tree as connected intimately to me, like kin (Mathews, Reference Mathews, Gare and Hudson2017; Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Taylor, Perdrisat and Wooltorton2023; Reason & Gillespie, Reference Reason and Gillespie2023). I think about what this tree has seen, for it has surely been there longer than I have lived in the street and probably longer than I have been on this earth. What has it seen, what has it experienced? I ponder what it knows about coexistence, about survival and what stories it could tell.

Seeing and being seen are two themes of my personal experience of the works in Forecast.

One cannot escape the gaze of those three young women in the largest work by Diane Jones and Eva Fernández, Sovereign Sisters, that arresting image of them enthroned, subversively draped in royal garb, with the dark forest behind them and the water lapping at their feet. Their gaze is direct, steadfast and powerful. It is knowing. And to me, it is a gaze that is determined, and one that demands accountability. This is important because when I visit my beloved neighbourhood tree, I feel fear; that it will disappear before its time like the evaporating trees in Forecast. I fear that it will succumb to our greed and desire to take more and more, that a developer will buy the block and subdivide it for yet more housing. I fear that it will not survive another hot dry summer, another year of low rainfall. Who will protect it now and in the future? Who is accountable? This fear is potentially motivating, the kind of empathetic grounding of knowledge that some scholars argue is necessary to activate behavioural change (Mathews, Reference Mathews2022; Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Taylor, Perdrisat and Wooltorton2023).

As a social scientist I am leading a team doing research on community awareness of and responses to environmental change and the hazards that are increasing because of it – bushfires, floods, storms and heatwaves – and the role of place attachment in community resilience. I can write a reliable and valid questionnaire to describe and measure people’s thoughts and feelings, with response scales designed to indicate how strongly people feel or how important various features of place, of Country, are to them. I can try to capture people’s lived experience of bushfires, heatwaves, floods and storms and predict how they might respond in the future. And there is value in using numbers to convince authorities of where to put their efforts; how to invest in community preparedness and response.

But numbers are not enough, and in identifying ways to build community resilience I have been thinking about how we have these conversations about the ways in which our neighbourhoods and cities – our places – are changing. These are difficult conversations in which we articulate our grief and our fears as we face the environmental challenges ahead.

We cannot do it solely through documenting and describing with facts and figures in reports, or scholarly articles in esteemed journals. The science is not enough and we must find innovative ways to hear and make space for these conversations. In this task, the expression of diverse voices, particularly those of First Nations’ individuals and communities, whose long-standing connection to and custodianship of places – Country – is critical. To do this we have to move beyond our Western cultural frame and reimagine our exchanges with place: seeing and being seen; listening and being heard.

Exhibitions such as Forecast prompt us to do exactly that: providing a place of listening, a catalyst for dialogue and a way in which we can sit with our feelings – to process them, as a psychologist would say. Not all of these feelings will be comfortable, and nor should they be – they should impel us toward reconnecting with and protecting our places.

Renee Newman: Truth telling and deep listening

I suggest my five-year-old son paint a tree from his life. I say, “consider how you might draw a tree as though it were your family.” “Huh?”. Silence. “If we saw trees as family, we might be kinder to trees.” “Oh, yeah. I get it. Grandpa is a tree.” He draws a tall, strong, tree. It disappears. Later, many months later, I asked him what it felt like to watch the tree disappear. “Sad.”

When he was a toddler we used to go to parks and lie on the ground and watch the sky. Then we would hug some really big trees, and we would talk, touch and listen to these trees. We have stopped doing that. I could blame work. I could blame time. I could blame myself. I do. But really, we just got out of the habit of tactile haptic playtime with trees. Watching his tree disappear, watching him dig into his memory of the tree outside our house, tall and strong, just like his grandfather, I clutched at a child’s capacity for imagination and then let it go as he wandered off to start playing with the red weather pattern flags.

My father draws an elaborate tree house. It is the small house that they recently built in their backyard – to house friends, family, rogue itinerant travellers – which we collectively call the tree house. The building sits amongst a canopy of Carob tree leaves, where once there was a flying fox and small wooden structure resembling more of a weather station platform than a functioning tree house. It is their pride and joy, and regularly hosts me, my partner and son, for weekends and summer staycations. My father, who spends his day planning quick actions to decarbonise cities, from grassroots to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, draws this tree house while his grandson watches and later joins in. My father’s thoughts circling: what could be, what the world could truly be. Different. Life would be so different. As the tree evaporates, my father’s motivation is clear. He wants to make life different for his children and grandchildren. He knows he is the tall, strong, tree, and he must continue to be better, for them, even when he does not feel tall or strong.

The second time I went to Forecast I told my son to roam free. Asked him what he saw in the large-scale portrait and he said, “I see Noongar queens.” He knows that the Noongar people were the First people. He liked their eyes and so did I. The eyes are the punctum – the Roland Barthes’ concept of affect, that “thing” in a photograph that grabs at your soul, beyond meaning, language, beyond time and space. Weeks later my parents took my son to Forecast. They declared that the middle sister in Sovereign Sisters was the spitting image of my niece. Familiarisation as meaning making. I get it. Empathy is what art relies on. My mother ponders time and space. She spends her days alongside survivors of childhood institutional sexual abuse, seeking acknowledgement and redress; legacies of forced migration, government policies mandating dispossession, poverty, and so on. Sovereign Sisters. My mother’s thoughts circling: what could be, what the world could truly be. Different. Life would be so different. I, too, am thinking about all of this as I watch my son’s interpretation of family as a tree, evaporate.

Helena Grehan: Slowing down and feeling hope

“I felt hope,” a response written by five-year-old Phoenix in the Forecast visitor’s book. I, too, felt hope, but also felt inspired to pause and reflect, to slow down so that I might see and understand the natural world as it moves and changes in and with the weather.

Forecast offered a space to sit and pause, to make patterns, to think about landscapes – their shapes, how they are moulded by wind, water, sun, humans, animals and time. How they move, adapt and respond. About the dynamic relationships between elements and about how and where we as humans are positioned amongst all of this. In fact, I felt that the exhibition afforded me the time and space to recalibrate my sense of self in terms of my relationship to, and position within, various weather states. In the quiet immersive space of Gallery 09 I sat and wondered, and in doing so the work opened questions of scale and form and through its evocative invitation to engage – whether with the powerful photographs of the Sovereign Sisters and framed landscapes, stones and the red felt triangles or the act of painting a “family” tree that slowly disappears – the work invited me to rethink my place in the order of things. Drawing me in to consider a range of life forces that operate on the micro and macro levels and to reflect on my own insignificance in this vastness. This is not to say, however, that it rendered me powerless. Instead, the experience of sitting in Forecast opened me up to thinking about changing forecasts in the broadest sense, and how each one of us might contribute to understanding, participating in and perhaps even improving weather states. As Edward Casey notes:

Sitting on the round felt stone cushions in the exhibition, placing the felt triangles in patterns, observing people as they paint trees – family trees – whatever that meant to them – was a calming experience that engendered a sense of slowing down, loss, hope and awe. Phoenix was right.

Jo Pollitt: Clouding/concluding thoughts

But how then to hope in the midst of unrelenting disappearance? Hundreds of trees were painted in Forecast every day, and every day hundreds disappeared – each new painting layering over another to form a palimpsest of time and asynchronous collaboration. The multiplicity of interdisciplinary responses to the participatory gallery experience of the slow fade and the exhibition as a whole resist a neat summation of collective feeling or collective hope; rather, it is connection across difference that presents as key in deepening relations with environment as kin and addressing the dire forecast collaboratively. As an exhibition, Forecast is a place of rest and (re)discovery, a studio environment of intergenerational and collective practice, and a participatory journey that invites slow feeling. Through the Gallery 09 methodology of relational and curatorial aesthetic care, the calm environment of the exhibition supported by the teaching artists is also capable of holding a space for anxiety, despair and grief and as such it offers a model for museums and educators to adapt for diverse settings in engaging with feeling with and responding to the climate crisis. The theatrical rows of easels and gilded gold frames invite immediate recognition while the evaporation of the water “paint” on the canvases serve to disrupt any sense of perceived romance with its unstoppable disappearance. Watching this inevitable disappearing encourages a deliberate slowing down; to grieve, to remember and to perhaps be confronted with colonial legacies, surprise and accountability. The slow feeling that Forecast elicits, makes room for thinking with the urgency of embodied, place-based and transdisciplinary understandings of the meteorological in times of increasingly unstable and inequitable weather states.