In 1806, the British sea admiral Sir Francis Beaufort invented the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force as an index of thirteen levels measuring the effects of wind force. It was first used for the practical navigation of nineteenth-century ocean space; through a system of observation, wind speed was measured by observing how it composes at sea (for example, waves are formed) and decomposes on land (for example, leaves are blown from trees, chimney pots lifted, houses are destroyed).
Across a variegated set of curatorial and editorial instantiations developed by Christine Shaw in 2018–2021, the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force becomes a diagram of prediction and premonition in the context of accelerating planetary extinction. The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea appropriates the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force as a readymade index for curating a site-specific exhibition in the Southdown industrial area of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, and a publication divided into three conjoining volumes published by K. Verlag. The project is extended by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, a public program and broadsheet series.
While the title of the project series might suggest a weather project, it is not about wind but of wind, of the forces of composition and decomposition predicated on the complex entanglements of ecologies of excess, environmental legacies of colonialism, the financialization of nature, contemporary catastrophism, politics of sustainability, climate justice, and resilience.
Excerpt
In this introduction, by relaying ongoing conversations with my co-editor, Christine, I have tried to situate the Beaufort Scale historically, as a document of civilization and its barbarisms, but also as a means to dislocate its poetic attunement from its colonial provenance. Reading the descriptions as potential modulators of both breath and attention, as editors we believe that while the Scale was developed in order to constrain and focus environmental observation in the service of Empire, it can also be read with a view to other practices of world-making with common futures. The book’s epistemic disobedience is thus a way to encourage and sustain diversities in the face of the ongoing and homogenizing coloniality of global capitalism. In this sense, we are in agreement with The Invisible Committee when they write: “Here it is not a question of a new social contract, but of a new strategic composition of worlds.”1 As one small composition among many worlds of struggle and many ways of world-making, we hope to have shared through this book-as-exhibition the work of wind and some premonitions of the winds to come.
—Etienne Turpin, excerpt from “The Beaufort Scale of Wind Force: This Land of Forces.”
Table of Contents
The Beaufort Scale of Wind Force: This Land of Forces
Etienne Turpin
Cold Wintry Wind
Allen S. Weiss
After the Storm
Amy Balkin
0 CALM: The Rock Cycle
Ilana Halperin
1 LIGHT AIR: Not Everything Can Be Contained
Mimi Onuoha
2 LIGHT BREEZE: Stillness in Motion
Tomás Saraceno
3 GENTLE BREEZE: The Gardener, the Rubber Tapper, and the Herbalist
Barbara Marcel
4 MODERATE BREEZE: Trapped in the Dream of the Other
Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen with text by Eva Wilson
5 FRESH BREEZE: Meghri/Agarak
Pejvak (Rouzbeh Akhbari & Felix Kalmenson)
6 STRONG BREEZE: Cmes’ekst
Tania Willard
7 NEAR GALE: Unsettling Practices
Tom Keefer and Adrienne Telford in conversation with D.T. Cochrane
8 GALE: Colonialism at the Sea Edge of Extinction
Macarena Gómez-Barris
9 STRONG GALE: LUKUMI
d’bi.young anitafrika
10 STORM: Unfamiliar Creatures Will be Scattered at Your Feet
Jesse Birch
11 VIOLENT STORM: The Gunshots Turned Out to Be Tear Gas
Anna Feigenbaum
12 HURRICANE: The Theory of the Fire Ants
Juliana Spahr
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- Contributors
- Rouzbeh Akhbari
- Felix Kalmenson
- d’bi.young anitafrika
- Amy Balkin
- Jesse Birch
- D.T. Cochrane
- Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen
- Anna Feigenbaum
- Macarena Gómez-Barris
- Ilana Halperin
- Tom Keefer
- Barbara Marcel
- Mimi Onuoha
- Tomás Saraceno
- Juliana Spahr
- Adrienne Telford
- Allen Weiss
- Tania Willard
- Eva Wilson
Rouzbeh Akhbari (b. 1992, Tehran) is an artist working in video installation and film. His practice is research-driven and usually exists at the intersections of storytelling, critical architecture, and human geography. Through a delicate examination of the violences and intimacies that occur at the boundaries of lived experience and constructed histories, Akhbari uncovers the minutiae of power that regiment the world around us. He holds a BFA in Sculpture and Installation from OCAD University and a Master’s degree in Visual Studies from University of Toronto’s School of Architecture, Landscape and Design.
Felix Kalmenson is an artist whose practice navigates installation, video, and performance. Their work variably narrates the liminal space of a researcher’s and artist’s encounter with landscape and archive. By bearing witness to everyday life, and hardening the more fragile vestiges of private and collective histories through their work, Kalmenson gives themselves away to the cadence of a poem, always in flux.
d’bi.young anitafrika is an African-Jamaican-Tkarontonian, London-based dub poet, theatre interventionist and decolonial scholar committed to embodying art that ritualizes acts of transformation from violence inflicted upon the people and the planet. The multi-award-winning Canadian Poet of Honour, author of twelve plays, seven albums, and four collections of poetry was recently recognized as a Global Leader in Theatre and Performance by Arts Council England. After receiving hxr Masters from the University of London, anitafrika was awarded a Dean's Scholarship by London South Bank University (LSBU) to conduct doctoral research in Black womxn’s theatre. In addition to being the Director of Curriculum Design and Pedagogy at the new Soulpepper Theatre Academy in Canada, anitafrika works at the UN's Global Initiatives Fellowship as Theatre Interventionist and lectures at LSBU. Shx continues to share hxr liberatory framework—the Anitafrika Method—with practitioners worldwide through hxr ongoing online residencies. Shx most recently worked as Director of Kaie Kellough’s Jah in the Ever-Expanding Song for Obsidian Theatre’s 21 Black Futures project and is currently completing Dubbin Theatre, an anthology of hxr plays written between 2000-2020. You can find hxr latest theatrical work in She Mama Wata— as an audio version that she wrote, directed and performed—featured in Soulpepper Theatre’s Around the World in 80 Plays.
Amy Balkin is an artist whose works propose alternatives for conceiving the public domain outside current legal and discursive systems, addressing property relations, environmental justice, and equity in the context of climate change. A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting is a growing collection of items contributed by people living in places that may disappear (or already are) owing to the physical, political, and economic impacts of climate change, including sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and desertification. Organized into "common but differentiated” collections, contributed objects together form a record of community-gathered evidence, and an archive of the future anterior—what will have been. The archive operates from the principle that any item is equally valuable as a record of present or projected future disappearance of a place, as chosen by someone there. It can be anything that happens to be there, including detritus, flotsam, or jetsam. As of 2019, the archive contains contributions from Anvers Island (Antarctica), Cape Verde, Greenland, Kivalina (Alaska), Nepal, New Orleans, Panama, Peru, Senegal, Trinidad and Tobago, and Tuvalu.
Jesse Birch is Curator of Nanaimo Art Gallery (2014–). He holds a BA in Fine Arts (Photography) from Emily Carr (2001), and a MFA in Art History (Critical and Curatorial Studies) from the University of British Columbia (2008). In 2007, he was a curatorial fellow at de Appel arts centre in Amsterdam. Birch was Co-Director/Curator of Access Gallery in Vancouver from 2008 to 2010 and Exhibitions Curator at Western Front from 2012 to 2014. He has also served on the Board of the Or Gallery (Vancouver) and has been active with the Pacific Association of Artist-Run Centres. Recent curatorial projects include a trilogy of contemporary art exhibitions about the resource industries that formed and fragmented communities across Vancouver Island and around the world. Birch has published in numerous exhibition catalogs and art magazines including C Magazine, Yishu, and fillip. In 2013, he received the Art Writing Award from Ontario Association of Art Galleries for his essay on artist Kika Thorne for the Art Gallery of Windsor. From 2009 to 2013, Birch taught at Emily Carr University in the Critical and Cultural Studies faculty.
D.T. Cochrane is an economist currently living in Peterborough, Canada with his partner and two children. He is an economic research consultant with the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto Mississauga and the Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade. He is a postdoctoral fellow in "Innovation and Rentiership" at York University with Dr. Kean Birch. He is also a researcher with Canadians for Tax Fairness, where he works on issues of corporate power and inequality. D.T.’s central interest is the translation of qualities into quantities, and the ways that process and its outputs participate in the many struggles to remake our worlds.
Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen work across objects, installation, and film that explore process of production as cultural, personal and political practices. Their work was recently shown at the Renaissance Society in Chicago; Serpentine Cinema, London; Fotomuseum Winterthur; Para Site Hong Kong; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Vienna; HKW in Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; and Congo International Film Festival. It is part of the permanent collections of the MoMA, New York, and M+ Museum in Hong Kong. They work and live in London.
Anna Feigenbaum is author of Tear Gas and co-author of Protest Camps; her work has appeared in Vice, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera America, The Guardian, Salon, Financial Times, Open Democracy, New Internationalist, and Waging Nonviolence. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University, UK.
Macarena Gómez-Barris is an interdisciplinary scholar, speaker, and author of four books and dozens of essays and interviews on environmental media, decolonial theory and praxis, queer femme and creative and embodied research methods and what she deems as “antidotes to the colonial Anthropocene.”
Her work addresses artful living and survivance in spaces of social and ecological suffering and include her book The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. In it, she theorizes decolonization in relation to five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also author of Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press, August 2018) that thinks from submerged perspectives and art-making, social movements, and creative intellectual labor to imagine worlds anew. Her first book Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009) traces fascism, the rise of neoliberalism, and memory’s obliteration as central to the nation-state. She shows how memorials, painting, and documentary film production are central to enlivening potential in the ruins of necro-capital. Her co-edited volume with Herman Gray of Toward a Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) addresses global sites of deep cultural imprint, and the invisible work of tethering lives of sustenance after catastrophe. Macarena is working on a new book, At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press) that considers the fluidity of colonial transits and the generative space between land and sea.
Macarena is Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor, and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media, as well as faculty member in the Brown Arts Institute.
Her work addresses artful living and survivance in spaces of social and ecological suffering and include her book The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. In it, she theorizes decolonization in relation to five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also author of Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press, August 2018) that thinks from submerged perspectives and art-making, social movements, and creative intellectual labor to imagine worlds anew. Her first book Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009) traces fascism, the rise of neoliberalism, and memory’s obliteration as central to the nation-state. She shows how memorials, painting, and documentary film production are central to enlivening potential in the ruins of necro-capital. Her co-edited volume with Herman Gray of Toward a Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) addresses global sites of deep cultural imprint, and the invisible work of tethering lives of sustenance after catastrophe. Macarena is working on a new book, At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press) that considers the fluidity of colonial transits and the generative space between land and sea.
Macarena is Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor, and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media, as well as faculty member in the Brown Arts Institute.
Ilana Halperin is an artist, originally from New York, based in Glasgow. Her work explores the relationship between geology and daily life. She combines fieldwork in diverse locations—on volcanoes in Hawaiʻi, caves in France, geothermal springs in Japan—and in museums, archives, and laboratories, with an active studio-based practice. Her work has featured in solo exhibitions worldwide including Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, Artists Space in New York, and National Museum of Scotland. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Inaugural Artist Fellowship at National Museums Scotland and a British Council Darwin Now Award. She was Artist-Curator of Geology for Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery. The Library of Earth Anatomy, a permanent commission at The Exploratorium in San Francisco, opened in 2017. Geologic Intimacy (Yu no Hana) toured a solo exhibition of new geothermal sculptures, which formed over a year between Japan and Scotland. Schering Stiftung in Berlin published a monograph of her work entitled New Landmass. Ilana shares her birthday with the Eldfell volcano in Iceland. Currently, she is exploring the karst landscapes of Yamaguchi Prefecture in Japan for The Rock Cycle (Yamaguchi). Her project Minerals of New York opened at Leeds Arts University in 2019.
Tom Keefer is a media creator and consultant in the field of First Nations economic development and governance.
Barbara Marcel (Rio de Janeiro, 1985) is an artist and experimental filmmaker interested in the cultural roots of nature and the troubled heritage of colonial imagery. Her artistic research PhD at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar investigates the essay film as a historiographical tool for decolonial thinking with and through images, with the Botanical Gardens in Berlin-Dahlem and its tropical plants being her current material of study. Parallel to her individual research, she often collaborates with other artists, researchers, and activists on projects resulting in visual and sound pieces, installations, lectures, publications, and participatory workshops about ecological relations and processes of thinking and practicing in times of environmental crisis and increasing social inequalities. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Disappearing Legacies: The Word as Forest, Zoological Museum Hamburg, Hamburg University and Tieranatomisches Theater, Humboldt- University Berlin (2018); Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2018); La voluntad de la forma, Espacio Pla Buenos Aires (2018); Fit Frame to Content, Urlaub Projects, Berlin (2017); Tropic Matters, V240 Amsterdam (solo show, 2017); Omonoia Athens Biennial (2016); There will come soft rains, GMK Berlin (2016); Vision and Fear Station, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig (2015); On Projection, Kühlhaus Berlin (2015); Through the looking screen, 175 Gallery Seoul (2015); and Desvenda at Galeria Marta Traba, Fundação Memorial da América Latina, São Paulo (2013). She received her BA in Film Theory and Practice from University Estácio de Sá in Rio de Janeiro, and her MA in Artistic Work within Media and Science Related Image Production from the Art in Context Institut, Universität der Künste, Berlin. She holds a scholarship from the Heinrich Böll Foundation and has lived in Berlin since 2009.
Mimi Onuoha is a Brooklyn-based artist and researcher investigating the social results of data collection and computational categorization. Her work uses code, text, performance, and objects to explore missing data and the ways in which people are abstracted, represented, and classified. She has been in residence at Eyebeam, Studio XX, the Data & Society Research Institute, Columbia University’s Tow Center, and the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited and presented workshops internationally, and in 2014 she was selected to be in the inaugural class of Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellows. In 2018-19, she was Creative-in-Residence at Olin College.
Tomás Saraceno is an artist and initiator of The Aerocene Foundation.
An award-winning poet, Juliana Spahr's most recent book is That Winter the Wolf Came (Commune Editions, 2015). She edits the book series Chain Links with Jena Osman, the collectively-funded Subpress with nineteen other people, and Commune Editions with Joshua Clover and Jasper Bernes. She has edited many anthologies, including A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism (Chain Links, 2011) and American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) with Claudia Rankine.
Adrienne Telford is a white settler lawyer based in Toronto, Canada. She practices with the law firm Cavalluzzo LLP in the areas of Aboriginal, constitutional, labour, and human rights law, and is legal counsel to Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek (Grassy Narrows First Nation).
Allen Weiss is a performance scholar.
Tania Willard, of Secwépemc and settler heritage, works within the shifting ideas around contemporary and traditional, often working with bodies of knowledge and skills that are conceptually linked to her interest in intersections between Aboriginal and other cultures. Her curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (2012-2014), co-curated with Kathleen Ritter. In 2016 Willard received the Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art from the Hnatyshyn Foundation and a City of Vancouver Book Award for the catalogue Unceded Territories: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. Willard’s ongoing collaborative project, BUSH Gallery, is a conceptual land-based gallery grounded in Indigenous knowledges and relational art practices. Willard is an MFA candidate at UBCO Kelowna, and her current research constructs a land rights aesthetic through intuitive archival acts.
Eva Wilson is a writer and curator based in London who is currently working on her PhD thesis at Freie Universität Berlin, researching the concept of virtuality and the virtual image in the nineteenth century. She was part of the editorial team of documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens, director of Schinkel Pavillon Berlin and curator at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21), Vienna. She has published widely, and, together with Adam Gibbons, is commissioning editor of the book series “ ” (quotation mark quotation mark, published by NERO, Rome), which looks at the forms and roles of publishing as and within artists’ practices.
- Co-editors
- Christine Shaw
- Etienne Turpin
Christine Shaw is Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery and Associate Professor of Curatorial Studies in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, a Research Fellow & Visiting Scholar in Art, Culture Technology (ACT) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Curatorial Research Fellow, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2021–2023).
Shaw’s work convenes, enables, and amplifies the transdisciplinary thinking necessary for understanding our current multi-scalar historical moment and co-creating the literacies, skills, and sensibilities required to adapt to the various socio-technical transformations of our contemporary society. She has applied her commitment to compositional strategies, epistemic disobedience, and social ecologies to multi-year curatorial projects including Take Care (2016–2019), an exhibition-led inquiry into care, exploring its heterogeneous and contested meanings, practices, and sites, as well as the political, economic, and technological forces currently shaping care; The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (2015–2023), a variegated series of curatorial and editorial instantiations of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force exploring the relentless legacies of colonialism and capital excess that undergird contemporary politics of sustainability and climate justice; and OPERA-19: An Assembly Sustaining Dreams of the Otherwise (2021–2029), a decentralized polyvocal drama in four acts taking up asymmetrical planetary crisis, differential citizenship, affective planetary attention disorder, and a strategic composition of worlds. She is the founding editor of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Blackwood, 2018–ongoing), and co-editor of The Work of Wind: Land (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2018) and The Work of Wind: Sea (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023).
Shaw’s work convenes, enables, and amplifies the transdisciplinary thinking necessary for understanding our current multi-scalar historical moment and co-creating the literacies, skills, and sensibilities required to adapt to the various socio-technical transformations of our contemporary society. She has applied her commitment to compositional strategies, epistemic disobedience, and social ecologies to multi-year curatorial projects including Take Care (2016–2019), an exhibition-led inquiry into care, exploring its heterogeneous and contested meanings, practices, and sites, as well as the political, economic, and technological forces currently shaping care; The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (2015–2023), a variegated series of curatorial and editorial instantiations of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force exploring the relentless legacies of colonialism and capital excess that undergird contemporary politics of sustainability and climate justice; and OPERA-19: An Assembly Sustaining Dreams of the Otherwise (2021–2029), a decentralized polyvocal drama in four acts taking up asymmetrical planetary crisis, differential citizenship, affective planetary attention disorder, and a strategic composition of worlds. She is the founding editor of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Blackwood, 2018–ongoing), and co-editor of The Work of Wind: Land (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2018) and The Work of Wind: Sea (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023).
Etienne Turpin is a philosopher, founding director of anexact office, and research coordinator of User Group Inc. LLP, worker-owned cooperative building software for disaster response and environmental monitoring. With Anna-Sophie Springer, he is co-principal investigator of Reassembling the Natural.
- Managing Editor
- Anna-Sophie Springer
Anna-Sophie Springer is a curator, writer, editor, and director of the publishing imprint K. Verlag in Berlin. She is the co-editor, with Etienne Turpin, of the intercalations: paginated exhibition series.
Co-published by K. Verlag and the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga
Copy Editor
Jeffrey Malecki
Proofing
Lucas Freeman and Anne-Sophie Springer
Design
Katharina Tauer
Printing and Binding
Tallinna Raamatutrükikoja OÜ, Tallinn, Estonia
Copy Editor
Jeffrey Malecki
Proofing
Lucas Freeman and Anne-Sophie Springer
Design
Katharina Tauer
Printing and Binding
Tallinna Raamatutrükikoja OÜ, Tallinn, Estonia
This book is published as part of The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea, a three-part exhibition and publication series dedicated to opening perspectives on climate change, environmental crisis, and resilience, developed by Christine Shaw from June 2018 to September 2019. It is the first of three volumes, with two additional volumes forthcoming in 2020.
The project series The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea is one of the 200 exceptional projects funded in part through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program. With this $35M investment, the Council supports the creation and sharing of the arts in communities across Canada.
The project series The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea is one of the 200 exceptional projects funded in part through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program. With this $35M investment, the Council supports the creation and sharing of the arts in communities across Canada.
The Work of Wind: Land
Rouzbeh Akhbari & Felix Kalmenson, d’bi.young anitafrika, Amy Balkin, Jesse Birch, D.T. Cochrane, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Anna Feigenbaum, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Ilana Halperin, Tom Keefer, Barbara Marcel, Mimi Onuoha, Tomás Saraceno, Juliana Spahr, Adrienne Telford, Allen S. Weiss, Tania Willard, Eva Wilson
Co-edited by Christine Shaw & Etienne Turpin
Co-published by K. Verlag and the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga 2018
336 pages
19 x 24.75cm
Colour images
Hardcover, thread-bound
ISBN 978-3-9818635-8-1
$42.00 (+tax)
Co-edited by Christine Shaw & Etienne Turpin
Co-published by K. Verlag and the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga 2018
336 pages
19 x 24.75cm
Colour images
Hardcover, thread-bound
ISBN 978-3-9818635-8-1
$42.00 (+tax)
Download excerpt: Introduction
pdf
Download excerpt: Cold Wintry Wind
pdf
Download excerpt: Theory of the Fire Ants
pdf
The Blackwood
University of Toronto Mississauga
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The Blackwood is situated on the Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Seneca, and Huron-Wendat.