Conditions of an Archive
First published 2018, Tenki Archive: Conditions of an Archive, Emma Hislop
When Dali imagined a surrealist landscape it was draped in clocks scorched by our hands, when I lived in it the reality was unrealistic perfection. Even when it snows the sky is blue as if to smile and provide seasons without scorn. Suffocating humidity envelopes you with a hazed careful mist bringing tempest’s might in the great forceful exhale and with it the downpour quenches long built thirst yawning into red until stopping all of time for days of slowed silence and cleaned eyes fresh for the coming pink bursts covering all. Japan has the clearest cut of seasons dictated by their natural ideograms but out with these lightning does not strike twice.
A souvenir, a trinket, a keepsake, a memory, an embodiment of a moment in time — when surrealism is captured with impressionism. A low laying mist sweeping through the sunset over Mount Fuji marks the end of Christmas day. This cannot be reproduced but collected? How can we keep our memories of moments in time that past fast with the cloud which carries them like artefacts stored in our personal museum? A treasury, a collection of valuable or delightful things. A map, a path, a system. A weather system, the system by which fisherman have lived their entire lives, the system which dictates all to all, the system that we began with, the system that will end us.
The weather is ever changing, just like us, as are our experiences. Archives will always grow as our collection of information from the world does and with that, maps. We are conditioned and governed by all around us which is all governed by the conditions of our weather. The weather of our world, and of us, internally. We each live by natures weather but also by our own and each other’s emotional, internal weather. The weather is a forecast, a forewarning, a system as old as time which we still do not read even when clear as a blackened typhooned day. We have always looked up for answers, reading our creator’s messages, the rising sun, creator of us and our land. But never do we look up and see what is right in front of us. Pure weather. Pressure. The system. We read stories of sci-fi matrix which open our eyes to our lives controlled by systems — never the system. Our weather system has created us, it does control us, we cannot please it, we cannot speak with it, but we can listen, we can read. Systems Analysts. Meteorologists. Philosophers. Psychologists. Artists. Interpreters of our system.
