THERMOGRAPHIC SPECULATIONS

By Camilo Léon-Quijano

This research project explores the fundamental role of heat and cold in the everyday experience of the city. Through a visual and ethnographic approach, it offers a sensory immersion into the different ways of understanding thermal perception in Marseille. The research focused on three emblematic neighborhoods— Belsunce, the Vieux-Port, and Les Crottes—to examine how interactions and representations of urban space are shaped by sensitivity to a ubiquitous but still understudied phenomenon in anthropology: thermal perception. The objective is to craft a narrative that features fieldwork situations, emic experiences, as well as excerpts from workshops and interviews, to highlight the importance of thermal experiences in the daily lives of residents. This narrative is both poetic and poietic, in which visual creation plays a central role. By integrating a varied graphic language— cut-outs, colored backgrounds, enlargements, cropping and graphic additions—it seeks to make tangible the bodily, sensitive, but also material and spatial dimension of thermal perception in an urban environment.