Latest Posts

Finding Focus

Published by Christina Geros

[ 27 July 2017, 03:30, MAA ]

As the plane landed on the tarmac, my introduction to both Chennai and Monsoon Assemblages had officially begun. For the past two years, I’ve been based in Jakarta, Indonesia–a neighbouring coastal megacity in Southeast Asia. On approach from the air, the glow of ship lights in the Jakarta Bay is the first hint of land as one descends from the clouds towards the city–a greeting that is matched by other coastal cities in the region. However, as I sleepily peered out the window searching for the Bay of Bengal, my eyes found nothing but land.

Of the many lessons from Jakarta, one is central to them all: the documented–often understood and drawn–geography of a place might be radically different to the experienced or depicted geography of a place. Stories and images conjured from the perspective of European Colonial histories of South and Southeast Asia, tend to orient cities to the sea–as points of extraction, collection, and departure. In the case of Jakarta, its history as the Dutch-ruled Batavia, tends to bend the city’s image and identity to the coast; although, many Betawi people (native Jakartans) still living in the city today identify with the river, not the coast (1). Evidence of the experienced orientation of the city towards the river(s) can be seen across the metropolis in both everyday activity and the patchwork of formal and informal urban fabrics–the story of the city’s character and creation. As I waited for my luggage, I wondered what gaps and overlaps I might find between the documented and depicted in Chennai. In terms of the city’s rhythms and the realities of day-to-day life, what role(s) does the Bay of Bengal, the rivers that traverse the city, and the waterbodies that dot the landscape play in the atmospheric forces of the monsoon in both the imaginary and real construction of the city?

Trained as an architect, urbanist, and landscape architect, when beginning a new project I start by defining a frame within which the primary characters will perform–or rather, a frame within which I can uncover the characters that will bring a project into focus. Both Lindsay and Beth had been in Chennai for several weeks before my arrival and I was anxious to hear about and see the sites of their work so as to consider it’s positioning in this new landscape. After lengthy conversations with Lindsay about scales of encroachment on Chennai’s water bodies and visiting Perungudi Lake with Beth, it was clear that these investigations were tugging at critical components of both construction and culture within this monsoonal topography. Over the course of the next few weeks, a series of events would unfold bringing into focus a launching point for my investigations into Chennai and Monsoon Assemblages.  

[ 3 August 2017 ]

Staying only a short walk  from Elliot’s Beach, we ventured out one day to see the Bay of Bengal. It was beautiful, peaceful, lively, and under construction.  Marching into the sea, enormous block buildings ushered the shifting sands of the  shoreline into geometries of control and stability. Unapologetically exposed under the brutal sun and the wide-open skies, the enormous scale of the development felt overbearing and insignificant in this space of transition between land and sea.

[ 4 August 2017 ]

The next morning, we thought we’d catch the sunrise and document activity around the Bay at dawn.

[ 1 August 2017  ]

Watching the sun reveal the form of clouds rolling in over the waves of the sea, I was reminded of the instruments of measure used at the Chennai Meteorological (MET) Office. The Regional Meteorological Centre in Chennai is one of six regional centres for India and one of the first modern weather observatories in the eastern part of the subcontinent. Weather forecasts are loaded with satellite images,  doppler radar, and digital interfaces, making it seem  like some mysterious science reserved for super humans and computers; in reality, the instruments used to measure weather–temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind direction and velocity–are incredibly simple even at the MET Office.

[ 10 August 2017  ]

A week later I interviewed Pradeep John, a Chennai-based  weather blogger about his particular spin on reading meteorological data against the Tamil Nadu landscape. Pradeep John works with data and is intimately familiar with the histories of Chennai’s waterbodies and terrain through their statistics. He has nearly a quarter of a million (and counting) followers on Facebook and many consider him to be the most accurate weather forecaster of Chennai. While riddled with interesting facts and stories, the most poignant moments in our conversation centred on Pradeep John’s assertion that the accuracy of a weather forecast is about interpretation–not only data–and that interpretation is about the human body, memory, and experience. Our experience of, and within, the space between landscape and atmosphere is visceral, not only factual.    

[ 11 August 2017  ]

The next day I took a drive south, along the Buckingham Canal towards Pondicherry. Nearing Pondicherry, the blinding reflection of the salt flats whose  stunning relationship between sky and sea are hard to miss.

[ 14 August 2017  ]

Pradeep John had mentioned that large reservoirs in and around Chennai were “wet spots”–meaning that, according to the data, these places not only held more rainfall, but received more rainfall (about 20%), than the rest of the city. Chembarambakkan Lake–that largest reservoir in Chennai–is one of these “wet spots.” So, Beth and I took an excursion across the city–via the IT Corridor, across the Pallikaranai Marsh–to see Cherambarambakkan. Different from the salt flats, but undeniably tied to the atmosphere, this place seemed to speak of something far beyond, yet intrinsic, to the land Chennai occupies.

[ 14 October 2017  ]

Defining a frame is an ongoing process that requires a constant refocusing of one’s tools and perspectives. Now back in London, drawing through the relationships and spaces revealed during  the fieldwork, I can see that all of my previous experience is informing the search–a little bit of sea, a little bit of sky, a river here, and a lake there.

Something dwells here. What it is, I do not know / But it’s grace brings tears to my eyes (2).

(1) Interview with Evi Mariani Sofian, journalist and urban studies scholar in Jakarta, on 2 June 2017.

(2) Saigyō, from Saigyō hoshi kashu

Bringing Climate Change Home: Reflections on a workshop

Published by Beth Cullen

Two weeks ago I attended a workshop, ‘Bringing Climate Change Home: Researching Weathered Society’. The event was organised by Heid Jerstad, an anthropologist and postdoctoral fellow with the Global Environment and Society Academy at the University of Edinburgh. I made contact with Heid some months ago via her online hub Weather Matters which facilitates conversations between scholars of climate change and encourages liaisons across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. The workshop was framed around certain questions: What do we need to do to make weather changes comprehensible? How do we focus our research knowledge on tangible pathways to find insights and solutions? How do we make our critiques matter, and ensure that the right people hear them?

Three key themes were used to organise the presentations: materials, rhythms and knowledge. Diverse topics were covered by scholars and practitioners from different institutions and disciplinary backgrounds. To start the morning, Michael Bonaventura gave an overview of Museums of the Future Now, a collaborative project using an unconventional methodological approach based on futures thinking and participatory practice. Ruth Wolstenholme described her work with Sniffer using forms of multi-stakeholder engagement to understand the impacts of environmental change, including work with urban communities in north Glasgow. Both projects have involved artists and cultural practitioners to engage with communities in novel and creative ways.

The next session was more anthropological in nature with presentations on vernacular notions of change by Elena Burgos-Martinez and Tibetan understandings of weather and temporality by Su Hu. I presented some preliminary research, based on recent fieldwork in south Chennai, which seeks to explore changing relationships with weather and environment by tracing how monsoon rhythms are registered and experienced in the urban landscape. The resulting discussions focused on conceptions of place, time, processes of change and issues of translatability when working with vernacular epistemologies.

During the afternoon, we focused on the theme of knowledge with a presentation on ‘Upstream Engagement with Climate Science’ by George Adamson, work by Patricia Pinho looking at ‘Ecosystem Services, Wellbeing and Climate Change in Brazilian hotspots’, and forthcoming work by Hannah Baxter attempting to understand how resilience works in Scotland. The day closed with Elizabeth Vander Meer from the Edinburgh University Estates Management team speaking about ‘Place-Making and Resilience for University campuses’.

Themes that arose from discussions included the benefits and challenges of crossing disciplinary boundaries, and the possibilities presented by ‘indisciplinarity’ if we are to destabilise dominant terminologies, tools and methods. Collaborative engagements with creative practitioners’ present fruitful opportunities for questioning the confines of academic practice. One of the participants described how working with artists enabled the identification of a shared point of departure with no pre-defined point of arrival, leading to a mode of working that allowed them to “keep the opportunity space open”.

Radical approaches unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries, associated methodologies and modes of thinking are necessary to grapple with the challenges that face us in the present and the future. However, such new modes of working also raise questions… How do we pursue open-ended, flexible research agendas whilst also developing the kinds of analytically rigorous arguments that are necessary for countering dominant logics? How do we undertake such work when the freedom and risk-taking inherent to such processes is often not supported or encouraged by the management frameworks, conventional methodologies and impact-oriented assessment criteria demanded by institutions and funding agencies? How do we work in open-ended ways within interdisciplinary assemblages but retain mutual clarity and coherence?

Many of the presenters conveyed experience and knowledge they had gained by living and working with people from different social backgrounds and parts of the world. A common finding was that people and communities often struggle to engage with the topic of climate change. Reasons for this are varied, for example, in Glasgow other socio-economic issues take precedence and in Nain Bajo people live with different perceptions of change which are not necessarily easy to articulate. Working with the notion of weather, as opposed to climate, offers a potentially productive way forward. The workshop demonstrated that researching weathered societies reveals tensions between proofing-against as opposed to living-with weather, the significance of differential experiences of extreme weather events, and the potentiality of using topics like food and wellbeing as points of departure for weather-related inquiry.

A shared challenge is how to convey, translate and represent the resulting knowledge to those in positions of power. For me, the presentations demonstrated the importance of place-based, everyday understandings rather than the generic, technical perspectives that so often form the basis of responses and ‘solutions’ to climate change. But how do we represent and demonstrate the relevance and significance of alternative knowledges when they are hard to translate into a common language or frame of reference? The workshop presented a safe and supportive space for people to discuss these issues, share their experiences and exchange ideas. Such spaces, and the networks they enable, are vital when undertaking critical social science work that aims to challenge dominant orthodoxies but which is often carried out in isolated or unsupportive environments and can be precarious and risky.

As I travelled home, I was left pondering over the use of certain terms during the course of the day, such as ‘ecosystem service’, ‘resilience’ and ‘adaptation’. There was an underlying mutual sense of frustration regarding how these terms are used and operationalised but, apart from discussions regarding contested notions of ‘community resilience’, we did not manage to explore these terms in more depth. This is possibly a topic for a future workshop. Questioning and critiquing such concepts, and associated frameworks, policies and interventions, is perhaps one of the most important contributions that social scientists can make to climate change debates; as well as advancing knowledge, techniques and ways of working that help to counter normative thinking and corresponding solutions. We will seek to engage with these issues further during the course of Monsoon Assemblages, in conversation with Weather Matters and others.

Monsoon ecologies, entangled landscapes and everyday lives

Published by Beth Cullen

Chennai Field Trip Report

Monsoon Assemblages is concerned with understanding large-scale and complex phenomena, namely changing monsoon climates and processes of urban development. As an anthropologist used to working at a more intimate spatial resolution, my challenge has been to find a way of understanding aspects of these phenomena at a more relatable scale. It is often stated that monsoon rhythms influence the social life of South Asia, but urban relations with the monsoon are somewhat ambiguous. Taking this as a starting point, my research seeks to explore how people conceive of and experience the monsoon from a dwelling perspective, in order to understand how the monsoon acts as an organising principle of urban life.

To ground my research, I focused my fieldwork on a lake situated between two important features of south Chennai, the IT corridor and the Pallikaranai marsh. The lake is a remnant of an ancient rainwater harvesting system designed to harness flows of rain and silt. Numerous such lakes, known as eris in Tamil, punctuate the landscape of Chennai and have formed an essential part of the lived environment for hundreds of years. Being dynamic entities which contract and expand according to the seasons, eris make the rhythms of the monsoon visible. They act as barometers of changing relationships with weather and environment by physically reflecting shifting human knowledge, attitudes and practices. As complex socio-ecological entities they also offer a way of understanding how plant and animal species respond to changing monsoonal patterns, landscapes and processes of environmental modification.

Before travelling to Chennai, I found historic maps of Chennai in the British Library’s India Office Records, which include depictions of the marsh and lake. These maps offer insights into Chennai’s colonial past and document how the landscape has changed as a result of human and more-than-human forces. To provide a counter-point to mapped perspectives, I was eager to explore lived experiences of environmental change from the viewpoint of residents who have also been protagonists in these processes. To gain access to people living around the lake, I used social media to make contact with a neighbourhood environmental association that formed to protect the lake following the 2015 floods. I attended meetings, interviewed group members and visited their homes to understand more about the group’s activities. Maps and historic Google Earth satellite imagery were used as conversational tools during discussions.

As well as interviewing residents, and local experts and activists, I spent time “hanging out” around the lake documenting infrastructure and sites of importance, as well as taking photographs and video footage of the people, plants and animals that the lake gathers. Walking was used as another mode of engagement and enabled me to sense textures, temperatures, sounds, smells and tempos. One of the most frequently walked routes took me from the busy roads and high-rise corporate office buildings of the IT corridor along the edge of the lake to the informal settlements that have mushroomed along the periphery of the marsh. This route highlighted social disparities as well as disruptions, blockages, and modifications to the local hydrology by various kinds of human interference and encroachment.

From my observations, it was apparent that middle-class environmental interventions represent just one type of human engagement with the lake. During the course of walking various other people who frequent the lakeside sought to make contact with me. Despite language barriers, particular individuals became important connections and welcomed me into their homes and introduced me to friends and relatives. As a result of these chance meetings, I gained some understanding of people’s daily lives and the rhythms of their routines and practices. Informal interactions revealed places, activities, and things of significance, including shrines, religious rituals and sacred plant species, which offer another reading of the lake, its surroundings and connections with monsoonal dynamics.

Engaging with the lake, and the various humans and non-humans that it attracts and mobilises, exposed complex ecological, social and political dynamics. The lake forms part of a contested territory with deep underlying tensions relating to access and control of water, silt and land; competing knowledges, claims and attachments to place; differential experiences of and vulnerabilities to weather and extreme weather events, all of which point to issues of power, politics and representation. By using the lake as an object with which to explore these dynamics in more depth, and by working collaboratively to find ways of representing the resulting knowledge, I hope to be able to demonstrate the multiple ways in which the monsoon is known and entangled in the fabric of urban life.

Having returned to London, my task is now to catalogue, transcribe and analyse the material generated during my time in Chennai. In the process of doing so, I will be reflecting on the themes and theoretical frameworks that have informed the design of Monsoon Assemblages in order to write a series of academic papers. I will also be working with other members of the MONASS team to explore and develop creative, visual modes of representation that can be used to produce outputs for our final exhibition. I am excited about the transdisciplinary possibilities and potentials offered by combining ethnographic data, visual modes of representation and the tools of design.

In search of bad planning

Published by Lindsay Bremner

Chennai Field Trip Report

The MONASS team of researchers – Lindsay Bremner, Beth Cullen and Christina Geros – spent six weeks in Chennai during July and August 2017, undertaking field work to better understand the ways in which the monsoon is entangled in urban life and space in the city. Our work was facilitated by relationships with the School of Architecture and Planning at Anna University, the Indo-German Centre for Sustainability at IIT Madras and the Care Earth Trust, with particular thanks to Ranee Vedamuthu, Chella Rajan and Jayshree Vencatesan. We each undertook many interviews, both formal and informal, with academics, architects, city officials, community organisers, environmental activists, meteorologists, planners, retired administrators, real estate developers and urban residents; we undertook photographic and video surveys of a number of sites and Beth engaged in detailed ethnographic research around one particular water body.

My fieldwork began from the widespread claim circulating in Chennai’s media since 2015 that “bad planning” was responsible for Chennai’s ongoing vulnerability to floods and other extreme weather events. I found it intriguing that planning was so causally related to flooding in the popular imaginary and interested in finding out what was behind this. What agencies, ideas, policies, practices and processes were assembled in this idea of bad planning? Who or what was complicit in it? What were its spatial and material manifestations? How did these entrench the plan on the ground? Were there any ideas, counter arguments or counter practices being put forward, as to what might constitute good planning?

Episode 1

I stayed in a number of places in the city. The first was in a suburb quite far to the south that had been laid out in a coastal backwater between the Buckingham Canal and the sea the 1980’s. It was a middleclass neighbourhood of three to four story villas interspersed with vacant lots. While staying there, I had my first experience of monsoon rain. It occurred at night. I woke up the next day to a damp, humid morning. The tarred roads were steaming. Between them, what had been scrubby vacant lots the day before, were now boggy wetlands, teaming with butterflies, lizards and happily wallowing water buffalo. The backwater had re-surfaced, its marshy hydro-ecology at odds with the hard surfaces and boundary walls of the human habitation inserted into it.

Episode 2

I then moved to a denser, older suburb just south of the Adyar River, where this hydro-ecology had been all but obliterated by tarred roads, concrete surfaces, storm water drains and seven to eight story apartment blocks. Here I became aware of the significance of the plinth, a device used by developers or property owners to raise the ground level of their property above that of those adjacent and the street. As these accumulate, they alter hydrological flows, determining the the likelihood of a property being flooded once the rains begin. Plinth height, or the lack thereof becomes a measure of vulnerability, which, given the resources that raising a property requires, is usually also a measure of wealth, class and caste.

Epsiode 3

While staying in this suburb, I made a number of day trips to the far southwest of the city, where I observed the process of marshland being turned over to housing. Soggy terrain is divided into lots demarcated with stone or concrete corner posts; boundary walls are erected; building rubble or trash is dumped to raise the ground level; this is eventually consolidated into a concrete-walled plinth and apartment building follows. Only if plans are approved by the Chennai Metropolitan Development Agency are roads constructed and drainage and services provided, but this is not always the case. This means that, more often than not, waste water and sewage is decanted into the closest undeveloped lot, until it too is developed and the waste is redirected elsewhere. Apartment buildings are often marooned in this sludgy wetland for years, till regularised i.e. approved as an act of political expediency, in the next election cycle.

Episode 4

In part of the city even further to the southwest, I visited two multi-story, multi-block housing developments being built by two of Chennai’s leading housing construction companies. They were being built not alongside, but over, the historic overflow channel connecting a large water body to the west to a marshland to the east. Critical during times of heavy rainfall as a way of channeling excess water through the marsh to the sea, this route had been constricted, canalized and passed under the apartment complexes, exiting as a toxic, trash and sewage filled trickle.

I was beginning to get an idea of what might be meant by bad planning. It was less about a plan, for most of what I observed had little to do with Chennai’s Second Master Plan, the official plan which directs development in the city. It had more to do with agendas and practices in excess of the plan that combine real estate interests and political expediency to encroach on common land, which, in Chennai, is, historically, land seasonally occupied by water.

The dictionary definition of encroach is “to enter by gradual steps or by stealth into the possessions or rights of another.” What I had witnessed in Chennai was the dispossession of water, seasonally deposited by the monsoon, of its habitual places in the city (rivers, wetlands, marshland, lakes, channels, aquifers etc.), leaving it nowhere to go but up. Infringements of water’s places in and rights to the city had resulted in an urbanism in which flooding was not an unanticipated consequence, but an inevitability.

I will be unpacking these initial observations and developing my thesis about bad planning further over the next few months, through drawing and writing.

Christina Geros joins the MONASS team

Published by Lindsay Bremner

I am very pleased to welcome Christina Geros to the Monsoon Assemblages team as Research Fellow. Christina joined us while we were undertaking field work in Chennai in July and has just returned to the London office.

Christina is an architect, landscape architect and urban designer educated at the University of Tennessee College of Architecture and Design and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.  She was previously the design director of anexact office and the design research strategist for PetaBancana.id., an applied research project in Jakarta, Indonesia. As a Fulbright National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellow based in Jakarta, Christina’s work used written, photographic, and videographic methods to communicate complex urban issues to a global public audience. Working with the PetaBencana.id research team, she investigated, mapped, and blogged about the realities and impacts of the eviction and relocation cycles that result from “normalization” efforts across the city. Recently she contributed to two films featuring issues of urbanism and landscape of southeast Asia: “Is the City a Laboratory?” a 90-minute two-channel film produced with Dr. Etienne Turpin and, “The Same River, Twice: a film about torrential urbanisms” produced with the PetaBencana.id team. Her work has been featured in several publications, including WIRED, Landscape Architecture Frontiers and Harvard GSD Platform 6,7, and 8.

Christina joins MONASS as a designer and design research strategist and will be working alongside Lindsay Bremner and Beth Cullen to develop the spatial strategies and visual language of the project.

Christina Geros

 

Design Studio 18 Chennai Exhibition

Published by Lindsay Bremner

The design research on Chennai undertaken by Design Studio 18 at the University of Westminster as part of the MONASS project, was exhibited at the Department of Architecture’s OPEN Exhibition from June 16 until July 02 this year.

For more on the exhibition go here. For more on the studio brief and student outputs go here.

During the 2017/18 year, DS18 will be visiting and working on Dhaka, Bangladesh, as the second MONASS studio in the University of Westminster’s M.Arch programme.

 

Monsoon [+ other] Airs: Videos available!

Published by Beth Cullen

Videos of the Monsoon [+ other] Airs symposium are now available to view for those who could not attend the event, see below. You can also find them on the MONASS YouTube channel. Please share!

A symposium publication with papers by the speakers will be available later this year.

Key Note
Sean Lally, Weathers: ‘Night White Skies’

Panel 1: Air Space 
Andrew Turner, University of Reading: ‘The INCOMPASS project and its Field Campaign’

https://youtu.be/lvsePcLZanw%20

Panel 1: Air Space 
Nerea Calvillo, University of Warwick: ‘Airscapes in the Making’

Panel 1: Air Space 
Victoria Watson, University of Westminster: ‘The Earth is Flat and Square – Yves Klein’s Paintings of Thunderclouds’

Panel 2: Weather Reports
Anasuya Basu, The Telegraph: ‘Kolkata’

https://youtu.be/akQoggOCJBI

Panel 2: Weather Reports
Rifat Islam Essa, Dhaka Tribune: ‘Dhaka’

Panel 2: Weather Reports
Neha Lalchandani, The Times of India: ‘Delhi’

Panel 3: Air Politics I
Stine Simonsen Purl, Copenhagen University: ‘Betting on the Monsoon in a town of semi-arid Rajesthan’

Panel 3: Air Politics I
Harshavardhan Bhat, University of Westminster: ‘Complicit Unknowns’

Panel 4: Air Politics II
Hannah Swee, University College London: ‘The Role of Cyclone Forecasting in Responding to Uncertainty’

DS18 | OPEN Exhibition 2017 Invite

Published by Lindsay Bremner

Next Thursday, 15th June at 18.00,  the end of year exhibition of the work of DS18, the M Arch design studio at the University of Westminster associated with Monsoon Assemblages will open. This past year students have been working on Chennai, from the perspective of how the city and its human and nonhuman inhabitants interface with monsoon rain. Some quite extraordinary work has come out of this, including videos, simulations, maps, drawings and models. If you are in London, on Thursday 15th June, do come along to the opening. Details are on the invitation below. Some of the student work is now on line should you not be able to join us and wish to see it: http://monass.org/design-studio-18/design-studio-18-chennai/

Monsoon [+ other] Airs: a multidisciplinary gathering

Published by Beth Cullen

Lindsay Bremner opens the symposium

Air: an invisible gaseous substance surrounding the earth, a mixture mainly of oxygen and nitrogen, necessary for breathing

Monsoon [+ other] Airs is the first of three annual symposia convened by Monsoon Assemblages. Each of the symposiums will be structured around one of the monsoon’s material elements: Monsoon Airs, Monsoon Waters and Monsoon Grounds. This year’s assembly interrogated questions of monsoon atmospheres, airscapes, media and politics. Envisaged as a multidisciplinary gathering, a diverse array of people attended including architects, anthropologists, journalists, meteorologists and designers.

As the programme emerged it became apparent that air, unlike water, has rather escaped people’s attention. As an invisible and diffuse element in some ways this is unsurprising. Nonetheless, air is essential; it surrounds, supports and infuses us, and makes life possible. Perhaps due to its abstract nature, the topic of Monsoon Air was interpreted broadly resulting in thematic panels on air space, weather reports and air politics. In this way, the panel sessions provided a way to bring together people working on air related matters who do not normally speak to one another.

Sean Lally of Weathers, a Chicago-based design office, gave the Thursday evening keynote address. According to Sean, buildings of the future will consist of climate-controlled areas of landscape. His presentation, titled Night White Skies, prompted thought-provoking questions from audience members about the politics of such spaces and the technologies required to make them possible.

For a video of Sean Lally’s keynote lecture go here.

The following day began with Andrew Turner, a meteorologist from Reading University, who introduced people to the monsoon through a scientific lens. Andrew pointed out that although the monsoon is often association with rain, temperature is the real driver; monsoon airs are heated and cooled whilst travelling over land and sea. Andrew’s presentation revealed the complexities of such earth system dynamics. It seems there is still much to be learned in relation to monsoon forecasting and prediction, with current research focusing on how the accuracy of climate models can be improved.

As a member of Design Studio 18 (DS18), co-led by Lindsay Bremner, we are encouraged to use data as a design tool and an approach to architecture. However, we are also encouraged to question and analyse how this data is generated. This directly related to Andrew Turner’s presentation, which described how data was generated to predict monsoon rainfall. Another fascinating talk acknowledged the social and economic aspects of the monsoon through a betting network in Rajesthan. Stine Simonsen Puri discussed her research in the town of Fatephur where locals use their knowledge to bet on rainfall occurrences. This talk offered an alternative view of the monsoon in terms of its scale and temporality, whilst also offering a glimpse into the information systems and speculative economies that revolve around the uncertainly of the monsoon. The symposium also gave me a chance to engage and communicate with speakers and researchers outside the field of architecture, as well as staff from other University faculties. I was lucky enough to interview the keynote speaker for the symposium, Sean Lally, with a fellow student. Meeting Sean, it was clear how passionate he is about his work and research. This experience has motivated and inspired me to become a successful architect in the future.

Tom Benson, MArch student and member of DS18

The Air Space panel was an extraordinary combination of monsoon science by Andrew Turner, innovative representations of pollution and pollen airscapes by Nerea Calvillo and the aesthetics of Yves Klein’s thunder cloud paintings by Victoria Watson. Nerea raised feminist perspectives as well as questions about the politics of data used to “make the air speak”. Victoria’s presentation illustrated the importance of artistic understandings and touched on Klein’s pertinent suspicions about the “miracles of technology”.

Andrew Turner and Victoria Watson

I attended the Monsoon Assemblages symposium with a little trepidation.  How would I be able to communicate the key issues, in monsoon forecasting and modelling for climate change, to an audience largely made of up social scientists and architects?  On the other hand, would artistic, architectural and anthropological findings surrounding the monsoon in India be of academic interest to me?  I was encouraged to find an engaged and open audience, keen to gain a window into the science upon which we base our estimates of the future of the Indian monsoon.

Andrew Turner, Lecturer in Monsoon Systems, University of Reading

Weather Reports followed with personal reflections by three journalists visiting the University of Westminster on the Chevening Programme, Anasuya Basu, Rifat Islam Esha and Neha Lalchandani, on how the monsoon materialises in their home cities of Kolkata, Dhaka and Delhi. Each of the reports offered insights into dominant media narratives and popular representations of the monsoon, associated urban politics, cultural practices and lived experience from each of the cities.

The Chevening Panel: Rosie Thomas (Chair), Rifat Islam Esha, Anasuya Basu, Neha Lalchandani

Afternoon panels on Air Politics featured contributions from anthropology, political science and philosophy. Stine Simonsen Puri gave an inspiring talk about her recent work with monsoon rain bettors in Rajasthan. Harshavardhan Bhat followed with an essay on the “complicit unknowns” of monsoon air drawing on scenes from Karnataka. Hannah Swee presented her ethnographic observations of cyclone forecasting by locals in North Queensland and Etienne Turpin gave an engaging presentation on the politics and problematics of mosquito fogging in Jakarta.

Etienne Turpin on mosquito fogging in Jakarta

Simon Joss, MONASS advisory board member, was invited to sum up the day. In his concluding remarks, the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries and methodological reflexivity were emphasised. Simon posed interesting questions about how the assemblage concept can be utilised productively to identify opportunities for purposeful intervention, and highlighted challenges around translating research into accessible policy recommendations and making academic discourse accessible to wider publics. We look forward to facilitating further conversations and grappling with these questions as the project continues.

The Monsoon Airs symposium was an extremely inspiring event; one of those rare moments where interdisciplinarity creates synergy and releases creative thinking. Coming from the field of anthropology, I was truly inspired by the visual and material approaches taken by other disciplines. The event not only enabled me to communicate my research on monsoon gamblers, I also developed my analytical arguments through my encounters with different approaches to the monsoon and air.

Stine Simonsen Puri, Postdoctoral Fellow, Copenhagen University.

Presentations were accompanied by a multimedia exhibition including contributions from various speakers and students from the DS18 Master of Architecture design studio. A group of young architects from Chennai submitted a fascinating video on the architectural manifestations of the monsoon in the Srikalahasti temple in Andhra Pradesh. The exhibition was curated by Anthony Powis with support from members of DS18.

View of the exhibition before the symposium began

Bringing together such diverse perspectives and disciplines within one symposium is highly unusual. Those who attended the event found it to be an intellectually inspiring and stimulating experience that served to open up new ways of thinking. Common threads emerged, connections were made, and important questions were raised about how we might better represent the air, and other more-than-human elements, in our work.

Chella Rajan, Simon Joss, Heid Jerstad, Stine Simonsen Puri, Hannah Swee

The collective of voices and ideas the first Monsoon Assembly brought together inspires the possibility, of a plurality in how we construct the air, the rain, it’s people, it’s objects and the world. Strangely optimistic, the Assembly seems to sift through the complexities of the Air and the Rain in proposing that more can be understood in order to do better things. The venue juxtaposed the exhibition and the performances of the speakers – collaborating two ways of constructing, seeing and listening.

Harshavardhan Bhat, Doctoral researcher, University of Westminster

For more information about the panels and individual speakers see the event programme: Programme170413_web

Videos of the presentations at Monsoon [+ other] Airs will be available on line shortly.