This event is part of the A tmospheric 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.
Dr. Sasha Engelmann (Royal Holloway\, Univ
ersity of London)
Title:
Emerging Cult
ural 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-ac
tivist communities are at the forefront of developing interdisciplinary and
justice-centred tools to address and respond to uneven conditions of globa
l heating\, specifically by probing heat’s atmospheres and ani
macies: how heat intersects with the practices and textures of life. I
n contrast to dominant academic discourses on heat thresholds\, temperature
regimes\, and climate exposures\, artists are probing how heat moves acros
s scales of animacy\, sometimes enlivening otherwise ‘inanimate’ objects an
d materials\, other times revealing the valuation and devaluation of certai
n 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 interv
entions 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 increa
singly volatile weather conditions with a diverse coalition of artists\, st
udents\, researchers\, and young people. In recent months\, due to the rapi
d 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 inte
rsection of affective\, political\, and atmospheric registers of heat.
Judee Burr\, PhD Candidate\, UBC Geography
This is an in person event hosted in room 229 Geography.
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