DISPATCH 4
Resourcing Weather

Part three of a three-part series chronicling a deep listening journey

By Nathalia Scherer
June 8 2026

Years ago, at a gathering on Indigenous languages in Brazil, we were grieving languages that had been made extinct over the last five hundred years. Specific ways of naming rain, animal movement, hunger, ceremony, danger, laughter, the exact color of a river at dusk. Then, one of the elders said something that has since stayed with me:

Languages do not die.
They go to sleep.

the precision of an affective element

Working with fire brings us inevitably into contact with disappearance. In Paul Valéry’s words, fire is “an agent of terrifying precision” whose marvelous effects on matter are “defined by certain physical or chemical constants difficult to observe.” Any deviation, he says, can be fatal: “the piece is ruined.”

In Archives of Discontinuity, when Jiordi and I began articulating the concept of Mnemosyne Data, we were interested in a particular edge of observation: how to relate to data not as something accumulated toward exact prediction or the promise of safety, but as a field of perception, a way of tracking discontinuities, strange signals, and affective residues across ecological and social life. Such tracking asks for a metric sense — temperature, fuel moisture, probability of ignition — but also exceeds the very instruments that make it legible.

There is, here, a proximity to cybernetics and systems studies, where information is never merely content, but a relation between signal, noise, organism, and environment. And just like what moves through fire is never only fire (atmosphere, soil, sound, seeds), what arrives with a human or a thing is never what's visible, but a constellation of traces, lineages, languages, memories, partially dormant, partially within reach. What kinds of listening apparatuses might perceive these traces without forcing them too quickly into a rigidity of meaning, allowing for different intervals of perspective?

During our work with Fire Protocols, something emerged that we began calling fire affects: a way of attending not only to fire’s measurable effects but also to seeing it as a structuring instrument that both affects and is affected by material landscapes and social, political, and cultural dynamics. The Fire Affects Logbook was one attempt to touch this matter: a field companion in which weather conditions, bodily sensations, memories, signs, and strange residues could sit beside one another without necessarily turning into the cohesion of a report. It allows space for asking: how am I being affected, and how am I affecting this atmosphere? Is this gesture, tone, or practice increasing or diminishing life force? Am I composing or mostly consuming?

Fire Affects Logbook. Partnership between SFIW, Lorena Mal, and op.cit./foundation

the liver as a listening apparatus

I love the word allocation. It makes me think of loca — the feminine form of mad, crazy, in portuguese/spanish — and, if heard through a latina-english mesh, it begins to sound like a verb for a femme-going-mad or a place for madness. This small distortion helps me think further about the conventional criteria used to designate what deserves to be heard, taken seriously; what deserves a portion, a place, an affordance.

Years ago, in my research around psychosis and place, I came across the tables and plates of Aby Warburg, and his capacity to produce, through the meeting of images, a “dialectical kind of knowledge between what lifts us toward the sky of the mind (astra) and what precipitates us again into the abyss of the body (monstra).”

The first plate of Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (in which he pinned thousands of images from diverse sources to large wooden panels to map cultural memory and the "afterlife of antiquity") does not begin with a known or beautiful painting, but with animal livers in clay, divinatory models, organs turned into tables. He was referring to the ancient practice of extispicy — divination through the viscera — where the liver was not treated as mere flesh, but as an interface: a surface where fissures, colors, gates, protuberances, folds, and fortuitous marks could be contemplated, not through the purity of a distant gaze, but inside a field where signs could appear, a framed place where looking at space became looking into time. The visceral observed up close, and the sidereal invoked from afar, were brought into the same operating field, both affording a place.

Clay model of a sheep’s liver used for instruction in liver divination in a Babylonian Temple School, c. 2000 B.C.

Warburg’s artifacts (and the method of the atlas itself), much of it composed from within a psychiatric hospital, has helped me look differently at something that I keep returning to, after more than fifteen years of working with funding mechanisms, resource allocation, and socio-economic agency: institutional uses of measurement— impact metrics, ROI, health indicators, or identity— often become shortcuts for judgement, evaluating too quickly and too distantly.

These inherited methods become more fragile as we presume modern instruments are sufficient to read the weather, refined enough to tell a symptom from a signal, an ending from a beginning, a danger from an unknown form of life. I believe, however, that what constitutes a more refined criterion may itself be closer to the nature of madness, and it stands as far from psychosis as from what public discourse usually legitimizes as institutional science today.

In that sense, to “listen to what was never written” does not mean to abandon metrics or methods, but to ask how they might remain in relation to partially illegible signals, rooted in a context, case by case. It is a matter of widening the table of rigor and legitimacy: allowing empirical precision to remain beside symbolic proliferation, situated memory, affective residue, and the time it takes for a symptom to show its origins.

space to be strange

“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”
— Andrei Tarkovsky

We are surrounded by “moral orders that disorder the earth” (Jamieson Webster). Panic and paralysis often don't come from a lack of information, but the opposite: a saturation of impermeable ideas, a pollution of space that intoxicates perception. How to nurture health as we navigate that pollution and the immense fears of contamination? Autoimmune conditions, mysterious symptoms, misdiagnosis – I’ve had it all and still am learning to face these visceral things, to anoint their feet, to honor this kind of involuntary porosity & intimacy with life itself.

This makes me think of a call when brontë, Jiordi, and I were talking to Sharon about some of the challenges from this past year on the land, and she said something like: “If people want to do something truly singular, they need space to be strange.”

A space to be strange is not a space without discernment, nor covered in purification compulsions or promises of salvation. This is where art (and the body) returns as an instrument of perception and precision. Clowns, singers, shepherds, burn bosses, dancers, and poets know something about pressure before it becomes weather. A joke, a voice pitch, a gesture can touch the field before anyone knows what it means. They can ask not only what needs to be done, but also if we can afford the conditions in which even hard tasks (like cleaning poop, harvesting entire trees, facing boundaries, entering yet again a difficult conversation) can still be done in good spirits. Not cheerful spirits, innocence, or a refusal of limits, but a sign that some composition remains possible while other inevitable decompositions are happening. Perhaps this is one of art’s oldest tasks: to make of a disaster an operating field, where what is relevant and singular in that precise moment can become apparent, and desire can still find a way, afforded a place to move through.

And the better we listen, the better we can notice that the capacity to live in an artistic way like that is not reserved for special people, artists, prophets, or analysts. It can happen to anyone who risks entering into relation with other grammars. A sleeping language, perhaps. A form of attention that had gone dormant. Hands in the dirt. A way of belonging to the earth that was never fully dead.

However, we have learned to distrust what does not appear (or what we cannot recognize). The visible has become our poor synonym for the real, our fragile contract with safety. And yet something does not appear, and still exists. Perhaps fear begins where I exist and you do not see me.

“I did not know where I was stepping,” Lispector writes, “although through the shoes, which had become a means of communication, he felt the dubiousness of the earth.” The earth itself, the first compact mass that supports us, also trembles and is not fixed.

“Not seeing is to cease belonging to the earth; it is to let the earth cease belonging to us: it is to lose what surrounds us; it is to no longer have total confidence in the body”. (g.m.t)

—

What may I trust, then? Everything trembles. I close my eyes for a moment. “Sing your village, and you will be universal”: sing mud, bad roads, needy animals, tones half-remembered, its exact dusk; “the voice is my river”. Singing like jokes, shared food, like resources at their best: not as evidence of virtue, but the genuine joy and risk of sharing, the pleasure of passing something hand to hand, tone to tone, laugh to laugh.

I remember a part of the prayer Jiordi wrote for inclement weather: “What medicine has lain dormant within this wound?”

What languages, songs, dreams, or futures are still folded there, capable of changing the shape of the past and the present? How might we resource the capacity to listen to them?

School for Inclement Weather is building a beautiful shared future by studying, restoring, and re-imagining endangered practices. Please consider supporting their work.

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Resourcing Weather

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