WARM BODIES GATHERING: HEAT AS AN ARTISTIC LANGUAGE
-by Marlene Lahmer
©Photo: Marlene Lahmer. Joshbi AIR, 2024.
My family says that the first word I understood was “hot”. I was two years old and my grandmother pointed to the kitchen stove in her centrally heated Gemeindebau apartment in Vienna, warning me not to touch it because of the heat. I walked over to the living room radiator, touched it and said, “Hot.”
In my mind, I draw a continuous line from this event to my artistic career. At 21, as an Erasmus student at the Estonian Academy of Art’s Glass Department, I became involved with glassblowing—a craft that requires a fundamental understanding of how heat affects substances, changes their aggregate phase from solid to liquid, and makes them prone to changing shape with gravity and movement. Glassblowing is an applied lesson on temperature exchange. The glass is melted in a furnace over 1000 degrees hot, and, once taken out, the red magma-y blob at the end of the blowpipe hardens and becomes transparent as it expands with breath. This allows the glassblower only a brief period to manipulate the glass as thermal energy is passed on from the expanding surface to the surroundings.
Quite queerly, I felt a desire to be close to this technique. Queer in the sense of Eve Sedgwick because I had “not even the patchiest familiarity with its codes” (Novel Gazing, 1997), with what it took to master glassblowing or where my observations would lead me. Now, seven years later, when I get my hands on a blowpipe, I’m no longer quite as obsessed with it. However, what the practice of glassblowing has taught me remains an integral part of my analytical thinking, and it is a central theme in my current PhD project, “Thermal Encounters,” which addresses heat as a relational phenomenon.
In summer 2024, as I write this, heat as a topic is not only with me but with all of us. In a time of urgent climate crisis, heat phenomena have risen to the forefront of our attention. Coping with extreme heat concerns scientists, urban planners, engineers, artists and other creatives alike. But heat is more than a climate phenomenon; it is the driving force of many processes that give life, comfort and creative uses. It makes seeds sprout, gives mammal bodies comfort as they huddle together in the cold, it makes glass melt. Heat inevitably becomes a communication medium as it is exchanged between bodies. But what makes us attentive to its effects and implications?
I turn to contemporary art for answers. Why? Not only because there is a noticeable increase of artworks concerned with heat, temperature and energy, but I turn to art as a field that affords affective understandings and is hence suited to mediate something as immediate to our bodyminds as heat. While the climate crisis is an important epistemological backdrop here, I focus on artworks that tell us of heat as something other than destruction and hazard, that instead perceive it from a perspective of care work, energy supply, and community practices. I thus examine the works of Kirill Tulin, Barbara Kapusta, and Rehema Chachage, who address a shared concern: the uses of heat as an infrastructure or syntax for coming together.
Kirill Tulin: “Help for the Stoker of the Central Heating Boiler”
Photo: Marten Esko, 2017
In 2017, Kirill Tulin performed his intervention “Help for the Stoker of the Central Heating Boiler” at the Contemporary Art Museum Estonia (EKKM). He used the museum building, formerly the office of Tallinn Power Plant, for heating purposes again. For a month in November/December—when the museum is normally closed because it cannot afford to heat the building to hospitable temperatures—Kirill invigorated the museum space and invited “helpers to heat up the space together, with wood and words.” (EKKM archive, 2017) He thus provided a place where bodies could come together, find and simultaneously create (keeping the fire going) the heat necessary for being comfortable in that space. Visitors would also come for reading, writing on the walls, talking, and making music together (an exhibition created as its own by-product). This site, where heat became palpable not as a given but as a result of labour, also bears important reference to political dependency on infrastructure systems and to the potential of decentralised supply in which “the border between the heater and the heated can become permeable and diffuse” (Kirill Tulin, Välkloeng 61, 2018).
Rehema Chachage: “Notes on the paper (Excerpts from processes of writing with Bibi Mkunde)"
Photo: Mumok, 2022
It is a site of community, too, that Rehema Chachage takes as a starting point in “Notes on the paper,” her ongoing artistic research since 2021: she revisits the open fire in her grandmother’s kitchen in rural Tanzania. She hangs large paper pieces in the room to collect soot and to let the fire write down its own witnessing of the site of community that is both the starting point and purpose of the open fire (the knowledge of how to make the fire is shared as is the food that is cooked on it). For this seemingly mundane gesture—soot on paper—to materialise, it takes the help of her mother and grandmother in every step of the process: collecting firewood, starting the fire, maintaining it. A video accompanying the hung paper pieces in the exhibition space shows this process while Chachage’s mother narrates. It is this practice of support that Chachage chooses to reveal and give stage to. Not only as a family task carried out by women* but also as a basic condition for her artistic creation. Chachage’s series archives the knowledge and relational wisdom of her female family lineage, posing it as keepworthy knowledge to academia and art institutions. Her paper, hence, becomes a witness of a heat technique that gathers people to collaborate.
Barbara Kapusta: “Solar,” 2022, 4-channel HD video, videostill. ©Courtesy of the artist
Barbara Kapusta’s video installation “Solar” (2023) addresses another potent heat source: the sun. She taps into solarity narratives that reevaluate the sun’s energy from being destructive to enabling a plentitude of life. This story is set after what humans consider the apocalypse: their own extinction. Set on a scorched planet Earth, exposed to “high heat,” the video’s narrators and actors are humanoid beings with metallic skins who nourish themselves by gathering solar energy and transferring it between each other.
They refer to the “abundance” of solar energy as “generosity” rather than as a threat.“We have too much of it to not offer it to you,” the narrating voice says. Kapusta’s work foregrounds these post-human bodies that have adapted to thrive on what made humans perish. But it is a “reparative“ one—recurring once again to Eve Sedgwick’s terminology—in that it addresses the audience of the presence with a gift. Projects such as the Indigenous Peoples resistance movement Tiny House Warriors in Canada come to mind (compare Jordan B. Kinder, Solar Infrastructure as Media of Resistance, 2021). For some communities, decentralised supply systems that thrive on the sun’s abundance are already a pre-apocalyptic reality.
As an afterthought to the heat processes described here, I’d like to conclude with a poem:
(in)exhaustible (re)source
a state of equality (is truly a)
dynamics of exchange
strata are punctuated, permeated
I put on a coat, I cast it off
I shed a skin (one of many shells that melt)
compressed fuel, compelled release
the flame is hottest at the tip
tongue in cheek
frictionless graphite lines lubricate the words that slip
could I insulate? (archipelago of volcanic insistency)
piezo speech,
pyro plosives spit,
flames lick
extincture
liquidity begets resistance
industrious leakage
how much of that heat
does a seed need
to germinate?
Marlene Lahmer (*1996, AT) is a feminist artist and writer. Her practice contains installation, performance, sculptural approaches to glass, and text. With these tools, she examines, for example: What does glassmaking tell us about the conditions of our environment and our precarity in it? What shapes our fragile understandings of intimacy and gender? How can (auto)biography and fiction intersect to form emancipatory narratives? Material-based, lyrical and theory-informed approaches overlap translucently, incongruently and sometimes complementarily.
Marlene is part of the art-activist collective Elsa Plainacher and publishes poems and art criticism. Recent exhibitions include: "Joshibi AIR Open Studio "(Joshibi University, Kanagawa, Japan 2024), "Fragmented Worlds, Common Grounds "(Barvinsky Art Gallery, Vienna 2024), "wie wir tauern - on grief & transformation" (Garage Grande, Vienna 2023), "until the thread breaks" (Kunstverein Baden 2023).
Marlene graduated from TransArts and English and American Studies in Vienna and did Erasmus in Glass Art in Estonia. She is currently researching feminist art practices and heat at the University of Arts Linz.