How to stand the heat? On multispecies practices of conditioning the air.

This paper is understood as a dialogue between an urban microclimate, a building, humans, and dogs, and different thermocultures (Starosielski 2021) and hence different takes on materialities and ontologies of urban heat in an everyday scenery in a living room in the southeast European city of Podgorica. The dialogue unfolds how heat can be perceived as a body-enveloping energy or heaviness that is swallowing up the air but also as a wavy flow of and between environmental and internal heat. The paper reflects on (a) how different perspectives on heat can or could be brought together in thinking heat as something atmospheric, (b) which practices of mechanical or electrical interference are developed and applied with the aim to condition such atmospheric heat, and (c) what actually is aimed for in applying certain practices? Reaching a (multispecies) thermal comfort (Barber 2020), or…?
 

 
 
@workshop HEATMATTERS
January 2023, Institute for European Ethnology, HU-Berlin
Transcript of audio summary
 
 
I’m paying attention to urban heat matters in the everyday lives of multispecies entanglements. And while the effectiveness of animals by global warming or heat is mostly discussed in anthropocentric terms such as the loss of biodiversity or extinction, in this project I’m aiming for a multispecies perspective on how learning to be affected is a multispecies everyday challenge of surviving, adjusting, adapting, conditioning and maybe also thermostating.
  
The paper for today is based on snippets of living room stories about how to get physical thermal comfort in a hot living room in a hot city. These stories happened in the past September during fieldwork in Podgorica, which is in Montenegro, in the southeast of Europe. And the dialogue partners of this living room stories is a woman I call Milena, myself, and then several other human and non-human bodies.
  
Milena is a woman in her thirties. She lives in an apartment with a kitchen, a living room, two bedrooms, and the balcony on the third floor of this residential building. The building is one of the citywide famous housing complexes set up in the 1980s during Yugoslav socialism.
Milena offered me again a room to stay for the fieldwork in her place, and she immediately announced that she will have a lot to complain about, about vrućina, the heat. Milena lives with a dog Mini, a middle-aged female, former stray and always fosters temporarily recently rescued stray dogs and cats in different health conditions.
  
One afternoon the outside temperature is announced as 35 degrees, the apartment was sticky and hot, the door of the balcony, a little bit open and the room, the window in my room a little bit open. And I felt that this little bit circulation was okay for me to sit there and to do some work. Then Milena enters the place and she asked me, why did you not switch on the Klima. And Klima is the local shortening for klima uređaj, the air conditioning machine, which is actually interesting to translate literally to climate device because uređaj can be translated to device. So, Milena then sent me to go to my room, close my window there, but keep the door open between the living room and my room. She goes up to close the door to the other part of the apartment. She closes the door to the balcony. Then she takes the remote control of the Klima and turns it on. It says 22 degrees on the display. She then sits down on the couch she always sits on during the days and often also spends the nights, the one in the direct stream of the climate device.
  
Melinda and I seem to have different practices of how to maintain the indoor climate. And apparently we have different practices of how to be with air conditioning machines.
So, what happened in these conversations on this couch is bringing into dialogue different thermocultures. I used this term here after Starosielski for thinking about modes, about how to attune to heat. And I follow her aim to evoke a “multitude of thermocultures”. And I want to take the difference between what Milena and I do here as a starting moment for exploring and understanding pluralities of thermocultures.
  
So at first sight, Milena‘s practices might appear to be centred around the AC, the climate conditioning device. But I think that the conditioning happening in this living room is more than just doing something with the HVAC infrastructure.
Milena had moved into this, then newly made building as a young girl in the early in the early 1980s. The thick brick walls, she says, would protect the interiors quite well from the heat. Milena remembers that her mother would have been one of the first persons in the house who bought the Klima. And this would have been in the 1990s and it would have been very expensive back then.
  
Milena got her new Klima three years ago. It is connected to Wi-Fi, and she can adjust it via an app. So, the klima, Milena explains, is usually mounted in the living room, the dnevna soba on the longest wall of this translated room for the day. And oriented after its direct stream would usually be the sitting corner like the two couches and during the hot period, Milena spends most of her not working time at home on this couch. And besides, in the direct stream of the air conditioner, the couch is also positioned in a way, that she can, when she lays there, directly watch TV on the other side of the wall.
  
And in these days, the balcony door would always only be open in the early morning before she goes to work. The blinds of all windows always stay closed. And with this setup, she says the temperature in the apartment would be okay to stand until the early afternoon. And even when Milena herself is not at home, then there are always dogs and cats in the apartment. So, she switches the Klima on via the app at latest 2 p.m. in the standard setting she had set it to 22 degrees. When Milena then comes home, she collects all the mobile or movable animals from all the rooms in the living room. She closes all doors from this room, lays down on her couch in the stream of the Klima, and, as she says, ideally stays there, not moving for at least a couple of hours to cool down, sometimes until the next morning.
  
Milena aims to get a certain thermal situation for her own home and has developed detailed practices of how to interact with the materialities around her. It starts with knowing the building, of course, and knowing when it gets hot inside, positioning the flexible parts of the facade, the windows and doors as a surface to a confined interior opening and closing this interior body or space, and then combining these practices with practices of mounting switching on and tempering the klima, the electrical air conditioning device.
  
So in his works on ideas in Western modernist architecture of doing architecture with the aim of making buildings and particularly the façade and mediator of the outdoor climate to reach a comfortable climate indoor, Daniel Barber describes conditioning as – I am quoting – ”How to prepare practice become adept at a set of usually muscular or physiological activities”, or ”how to mechanical transform an interior space into a pleasant thermal environment”. So, interpretively playing through Barber’s terms with what is happening in this living room stories, I would say that Milena applies starting from the façade of her building, a combination of mechanical and electrical practices of air conditioning. Keeping blinds closed, and by that enforcing the surface of the building the borders, between outdoor and indoor climate, opening a particular window at a particular time to allow the two microclimates to float into each other to get some exchange of air. And into these practices of air conditioning she integrates the electrical air conditioning machine, the electrical cooling device in switching it on when the heat mitigating effect of the mechanical practices is not enough anymore.
  
So, in these living room stories animal bodies appear recovering in this apartment from heat stress, resting on the couch in the stream of the AC, but sometimes also having to be tempered in a certain way for health conditions and so on. Having this multispecies contact zone also as a multispecies termal comfort zone comes with a lot of knowledge and the practices and the detailed fine tuning. The klima in Milena’s apartment of course cannot be on 24/7. So in order to balance the temperature in this living room and to make all these bodies in this apartment feel comfortable enough, Milena has to create a rhythm of practices and assembling them in a functional way reminds of how Nicole Starosielski traces back to device and the concept of the thermostat to actual human practices: When she points out that the first thermostats would have been female domestic workers modulating the indoor climate by setting up and monitoring the fire, ventilating the rooms and so on. And from thinking these living room scenes through the perspective of a thermostat as a practice of arranging a home, but also of care, I wonder if what is happening in this living room climate dialogue can be seen as multi-species practices of thermostating.