Weather Report from the Immediate Unreality

Weather Report from the Immediate Unreality, 2020

A poem-film by Al-Qaisi Jasmina & Anastasia Manole

Weather report from the immediate unreality is a work done in correspondence between different forms of communication and art expression seeking a translation of what a weather report could imply. This work does not take a regular catastrophic scenario as a starting point, but an invisible and personal breakdown of a weather reporter. Preparing herself for the regular weather forecast transmission in the ‘immediate unreality’ – the reality from before going live, a pre-spectacle – she could either make her last weather report or suggest this whole vision is a genre in itself. The pre-spectacle becomes the source of spectacle, yet showing a forecast of emotions, audible in an inner-monologue, a sounding-poem which abstracts the real feelings of this presenter: mistrust in the data she normally has to deliver to indefinite crowds. She does not believe anymore in her job, namely to bring the weather to people with the most accuracy. She thinks that can’t happen anymore for some reason, mostly because she finds weather more and more unpredictable. This poem pictures her trying everything else but the weather report data to read the weather, and has a breakdown noticing nothing works. A cloud of words is complementing the image, a sound from somewhere else, just like a transmission from inside of a head in first person, is spoken as from very close to an ear. The voices we hear is actually resembling a monologue where it’s a little unclear that the lament of the weather forecaster is as well confusing their identity with the con- cept of weather itself. The information in this poem is a mix of scientific translations, superstitions, inexact knowledge, archaic knowledge of animals and plants and reading the weather in personal emotions and concerns.

The immediate irreality, coming from Max Blecher, is happening already. The tragedies are there, inequality being one of the persistent ones that contributes to how we feel weather dissimblances differently everywhere in the world. Probably in a lesser intensity in those places where resilience for catastrophes is in favor for survival, very often places with hegemonic histories. People are weakened daily by bad news from both behind and in front of them. Facing weather changes we are ancestrally losing it, knowing since forever we can’t control it, we viscerally need to fictionalize around it. This work proposes a stage where a person becomes the weather – a very human centric approach to the world and simultaneously a call for disrupting a binary. Becoming in fiction is imagining, and that makes possible a fantasy for breaking boundaries between us as human bodies and ‘nature’ as external to us. This binary keeps us distant from embracing the world on the scale from known disaster to unknown beauty. This work is a proposal for participating in the world and not waiting for it to unravel to us and the viewer is invited to think of the life of a retired weather reporter, finally at leisure.

Jasmina Al-Qaisi text, audio and voice – Jasmina Al-Qaisi is a writer and archivist. She often makes waves on free, independent, temporary or mobile radios and is a member of the sound interested artist group Research and Waves. She co-authors diverse audio actions with the artist Ralf Wendt.

Anastasia Manole video and performing – Anastasia Manole uses mostly stock images, Google-searched images or YouTube videos, relying on basic skills of montage and editing that remain deliberately sketchy and unfinished. These works provide a subjective commentary on how art has become again a craft that imitates reality. Displaying a wide range of topics and themes rooted in self-referential exploration, Anastasia Manole shifts between spontaneous displays of feminism and remixable data.

Roberta Curcă publication design and illustration – Roberta Curcă is an artist working with repetition, seriality and variability. Her work is interdisciplinary combining academic research with drawing, photography, sculpture and objects often under an anthropological lens. Her focus is on discovering and exploring surprising things about the built world, often revealing the potential of otherwise invisible structures.

Ralf Wendt sound composition – Ralf Wendt works within time-based and literary arts on the deconstruction of human and animal language, questioning orders of things. Since the mid-90s he has thematised in performances, films and radio art, a poetics of the suprasegmentalia and worked as a curator of art, music or radio art festivals where he brings together different forms of artistic expression interested in utopic/dystopic societal disturbances.

Andreea Drăghicescu production

Valentina Iancu curation – Valentina Iancu is a researcher with art history and image theory studies, working independently between Bucharest and Berlin. Her practice is hybrid, text-based, and split between editorial, educational, curatorial and management work.

Cover of the publication Caterpillar of the Isabella tiger moth

Project co-financed by the National Cultural Fund Administration. The project does not necessarily represent the position of the National Cultural Fund Administration. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or how the project results can be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.