Tali Weinberg

In response to worsening climate crisis, Tali Weinberg draws on the embodied and relational qualities of weaving to transform data into a feminist, material archive of climate knowledge, care, and attention. In this exhibition she looks to watersheds for alternative, feminist, anti-colonial understandings of our relationships to place. Watersheds—areas of land defined by the water bodies into which they drain—are delineated by the earth itself, not by nation states; attending to flows and relations rather than policed borders. What shifts when one understands home as a watershed, rather than a city or state? Might that interrupt the patriarchal, colonial thinking that divides our understanding of here and away, self and other, earth and body, nature and culture? As the detritus of our human life on land runs downstream and then circulates back through bodies, watersheds attest to the interdependence of ecological and human health. Can reflecting on the ways of water help move us past the destructive extractivism that ultimately makes us sick?

These weavings are part of a larger body of work in which Tali creates abstracted land/waterscapes out of climate data, plant-derived fibers and dyes and petrochemical-derived medical tubing and fishing line. These datascapes merge practices of record keeping with practices of grieving and merge expressions of scientific research with expressions of lived experience. Together, they trace relationships between climate crisis, water, extractivism, illness, and displacement; between disparate places; between personal and communal loss; and between corporeal and ecological bodies.