This event is part of the Atmospheric Apparitions mini-symposium on Sept 18-19 2025. It is is free and open to the public. We encourage you to visit the departmental Atmospheric Apparitions: Particle Pollutants – Dust, Ash, Smog and Smoke! exhibition in the Liu Lobby Gallery on view from July 21-Sept 26, 2025.
Speaker:
Dr. Sasha Engelmann (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Title:
Emerging Cultural Geographies of Heat: Artistic Experiments with Heat’s Atmospheres and Animacies
Abstract:
How do we practice cultural geography in an increasingly hot and flammable world? How do we make sense of record-level heat stress, devastating wildfires, and many other registers of heat that daily affect bodies, cultures, and lifeways? In this talk, I reflect on emergent cultural geographies of heat through the lens of artist-activist communities. In my reading, artist-activist communities are at the forefront of developing interdisciplinary and justice-centred tools to address and respond to uneven conditions of global heating, specifically by probing heat’s atmospheres and animacies: how heat intersects with the practices and textures of life. In contrast to dominant academic discourses on heat thresholds, temperature regimes, and climate exposures, artists are probing how heat moves across scales of animacy, sometimes enlivening otherwise ‘inanimate’ objects and materials, other times revealing the valuation and devaluation of certain bodies or ‘ways of life’. In doing so, they lead us to think about time in expansive and speculative ways, offering alternative accounts of fossil histories and catastrophes. Following a survey of artistic-activist interventions that develop heat’s animacies, I explore the Year of Weather, a durational project initiated by the open-weather artistic network, that investigates situated relations to global heating and increasingly volatile weather conditions with a diverse coalition of artists, students, researchers, and young people. In recent months, due to the rapid decommissioning of environmental datasets and weather satellite services in the US, open-weather’s artistic tools and infrastructures have become ‘hot’ in ways we could never have anticipated, reflecting the intersection of affective, political, and atmospheric registers of heat.
Bio:
Sasha Engelmann is a London-based cultural geographer and creative practitioner. Her research centres on long-term collaboration with artist-activist communities; through these collaborations she develops arts and humanities-led tools for environmental knowledge making, and advances the field of the geohumanities. Her past work has involved over a decade of creative collaboration with the international Aerocene Community and Studio Tomás Saraceno; participation in DIY and feminist amateur radio arts collectives including Shortwave Collective and Radio Amatrices; and co-development of Sensora, a community-led air quality sensing initiative in Argentina. She is co-founder (with Soph Dyer) of the feminist satellite imaging project open-weather. Sasha is Reader in GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway University of London where she teaches at the intersection of geography and the arts and humanities.
Respondent:
Judee Burr, PhD Candidate, UBC Geography
This is an in person event hosted in room 229 Geography.
