Justheat in Noi Intre Noi

Justheat is a multi-disciplinary research project that explores how experiences of previous domestic energy change might be used to inform our current decarbonisation process. Home heating change is led by political, technological and economic directives, and may not recognise how home heating is part of our way of life. Paying careful attention to how home heating is connected to identities, skills, relationships, communities, histories and wider ‘practice’ of managing a home, will mean decarbonisation changes can be made more fairly, sensitively and effectively.
Justheat brings energy, politics, history, and architecture researchers, together with artists, to explore communities’ attachments to their home heating and their experiences of historic change- in Romania, Finland, Sweden and the UK. These are nations with significantly different energy histories and contemporary practices.
The four artists spent time working with the researchers, listening to oral histories, visiting communities, and developing a visual response. When considered as a group of practices, the artists adopt different strategies and raise different and difficult questions about time, emotion, narrative and representation. Shaw is both artist and also the lead artist, steering critical reflection into artistic process.
Within the UK oral histories, the commitment to individual and tangible heating sources seems connected to a need for security and control, and coal as a ‘total heating system’ that produces belonging and community. While this is a barrier to decarbonisation, the project recognises that the values evoked are important. Shaw’s work experiments with ways to ‘animate’ the UK heating stories, bringing together analogue drawings, children’s book illustrations and digital Christmas cards featuring the open fire. The works focus specifically on the ways visual ‘transition’ between different media or different time and how this can generate insight into our relationship to the material and the intangible, individual and social, and the present, past and future.