Cartographies de l’ombre

Cartographies de l’ombre is an installation and an instrument for instigating collective reflection on spatial practices: A piece of climate-adaptive architecture and a tool for collecting situated, everyday knowledge about how people live with heat in the city.

How did Marseillais.e.s live through the heat wave? Where did they find relief under the hot summer's sun? How did their ways and their movements though the city change under extreme temperatures?

Cartographies de l’ombre is a weekend-long public intervention that installs a temporary sunshade structure on a square in Marseille, that is structurally exposed to heat. The lack of trees, arcades, or permanently installed shadowing canopies usually obliges people to pass by quickly. The temporary installation offers momentary relief and a becomes a space of conversation: Underneath it, we invite locals to take part in a sensitive and hand-drawn mapping exercise.

Marking the detours they take to find shade, the places they avoid in their city in summer, and the improvised strategies they've developed to cope with urban heat, Cartographies de l’ombre aims to collect local knowledges on spatial coping and adaptation strategies. The installation thus becomes both infrastructure and instrument for instigating collective reflection on spatial pactices: A piece of climate-adaptive architecture and a tool for collecting situated, everyday knowledge about how people already live with heat. The resulting map, growing over the week, is turning individual coping strategies into a shared, visible archive of local adaptation strategies, and a quiet argument for where shade (or, in a larger sense, heat protection) is needed.

With this action we aim to spark a conversation and an exchange of local knowledges about how we navigate everyday life in the city under altered climate conditions. We seek to collectively produce material that underlines the need for more heat-adapted spaces in Marseille. We believe that an artistic intervention can help valorize implicit, embodied forms of knowledge, and potentially lay the groundwork for further participatory projects on heat experience in our city.