Cultural geography of heat: Artistic experiments with heat’s animacies

Abstract How do we practise cultural geography in an increasingly hot, thermally inequitable, 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? A sustained, cultural geographical engagement with heat is long overdue. In this article, I further cultural geographies of heat through the lens of contemporary art and art activism. In my reading, artists and artist‐activist communities are addressing and responding to uneven conditions of global heating by exploring heat’s animacies : how heat interweaves with scales of life and liveliness embedded in culture and language, affecting the “ordering” of worlds. In contrast to dominant academic discourses on heat stress, thermo‐metric thresholds, 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 “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 an engagement with artistic interventions centring heat as ambient (temperature), burning (fire), radiant (energy), and chemical (spent or unspent fossil fuel), I draw from media studies, cultural anthropology, and art history to build a theoretical case for heat’s animacies. The article concludes by reaffirming the need for a cultural geographical research agenda mobilising creative and artistic engagements with heat.