The Cooling Solution: between art and science

The Cooling Solution is a scientific project that uses photography to investigate how people of different socioeconomic backgrounds around the world adapt to high temperatures and humidity. It combines scientific findings with personal stories, offering a visual journey through people’s lived experiences of ineffective and inefficient cooling, hypercooling, heat dumping, vernacular architecture, and cutting-edge cooling technologies in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Italy.

The Cooling Solution is a scientific project that uses photography to investigate how people of different socioeconomic backgrounds around the world adapt to high temperatures and humidity. Beginning with the title, the term solution is meant to call this adaptation paradigm into question. The project examines the phenomenon of rising AC demand in its various facets, addressing its numerous shortcomings and drawbacks, as well as the reasons underlying its use, which are often related to the necessity of protecting the most fragile members of society from health hazards. It is within this context that. According to the report of the International Environmental Agency, “The Future of Cooling”, published in 2018, 10 new AC units will be sold every second for the next 30 years, bringing the number of installed cooling units worldwide to 5.6 billion by 2050. 

The Cooling Solution combines scientific research, photography, and storytelling to investigate people’s lived experiences as they deal with thermal discomfort in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Italy. The project brings together the scientific results  of the 5-year-long European research project ENERGYA with personal stories about everyday strategies to cope with heat, as influenced by socioeconomic conditions, demographics, urbanization, and culture. The goal is to use photography’s communicative power to make academic knowledge accessible to the wider public.

As AC becomes cheaper and more efficient, it may end up being used in places where heat stress could instead be adequately tackled by passive cooling solutions. As a result, humanity is facing the risk of being trapped in a new, vicious cycle created by consolidated behaviors and urban environments shaped by the ubiquity of AC. It is now clear that the era of energy-intensive material comfort must come to an end. What is perhaps less clear is that sacrificing this way of living doesn’t mean sacrificing thermal comfort, a concept whose parameters are determined not only by climate, but also by habits, culture, and society. 

This exhibition is a journey through human experiences in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Italy that focuses on cases of hyper cooling, heat dumping, lack of cooling, traditional cooling and cutting-edge technologies. While these countries, however different, are following a similar trend driving them towards a homogenized notion of thermal comfort, The Cooling Solution also examines vernacular architecture, alternative cooling methods, innovation, and dedicated research efforts. No doubt we will live on a warmer planet, and no doubt AC can and will save lives. However, there is also a great richness in the diversity of cooling methods available that are waiting to be re-discovered, re-visited, and scaled-up.