The Cooling Solution lands in New York City

After the success of its installments in Venice in 2023, the photographic and scientific exhibition The Cooling Solution is now in New York City at the Photoville Festival, from June 1st till 16th, 2024.

The Cooling Solution is one of the 80 exhibits set in the prestigious context of Photoville, a city-wide open air photography festival which hosts each year selected photographic projects from all over the world.

The multimedia science communication and outreach project resulting from the collaboration between Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, CMCC and EIEE was selected from over 900 proposals to bring its idea of scientific dissemination for the climate transition to Photoville’s iconic shipping containers in Brooklyn Bridge Park. 

A one-of-a-kind project, The Cooling Solution combines the economic research of climate economist Enrica De Cian with reportages by Elementsix, blending them with the photographic vision of reporter Gaia Squarci and a sophisticated web of data, graphs, infographics and texts to make visitors understand the close connection between science, climate change and the daily life of common persons in four different countries. Moreover, the exhibition invites visitors to interact with the content proposed to express their direct experience and understanding of the impacts of their own energy consumption on the dynamics of climate change.

Thanks to the 32 photographs with captions and the 4 infographics installed at Photoville 2024, The Cooling Solution investigates how people of different socioeconomic backgrounds around the world adapt to high temperatures and humidity. The exhibition combines scientific results 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.

Photoville is an annual, city-wide open air photography festival in New York City hosting since 2011 a nationwide program of public art exhibitions. Visited last year by more than 1.000.000 persons over 2 weeks across all five boroughs of NYC, the Photoville festival curates and presents in 2024 over 85 free outdoor photo exhibitions.

LOGISTICS

The annual Photoville Festival is returning to Brooklyn Bridge Park and in all five boroughs of NYC, on June 1-16, 2024. The kick off of this year’s festival is on June 1st & 2nd, 2024 for the Opening Weekend Community Celebration in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

The Cooling Solution at Photoville is on view at Container 15 (location number 1 on the Photoville map) in Brooklyn Bridge Park, Emily Warren Roebling Plaza, 1 Water St, Brooklyn, NY 11201. 

The Cooling Solution features photography by Gaia Squarci, research by the ENERGYA team led by prof. Enrica De Cian, at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Fondazione CMCC, and EIEE, the curatorship by Kublaiklan, and the project coordination by Elementsix.

TEAM & SPONSORS

The project is the result of a collaboration with the ENERGYA research team led by Enrica De Cian at the Department of Economics at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, THE NEW INSTITUTE Centre for Environmental Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, CMCC Foundation – Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, the European Institute on Economics and the Environment, supported by the European Research Council (GA No. 756194) and Fondazione Ca’ Foscari.

The exhibition and catalog, curated by the collective of curators Kublaiklan, would not have been possible without the economic research led by Enrica De Cian and her ENERGYA team, the ethnographic research conducted by Antonella Mazzone, the policy research carried out by Marinella Davide, and the photography by Gaia Squarci, all of which were coordinated by Elementsix.

BIOS

• Gaia Squarci is a photographer and videographer who divides her time between Milan and New York City, where she teaches Digital Storytelling at ICP. Gaia is an IWMF fellow and a National Geographic grantee, as well as a contributor for Prospekt. With a background in art history and photojournalism, she leans towards a personal approach that distances itself from the descriptive narrative tradition in documentary photography and video. Her work focuses on themes linked to the relationship between human beings and the environment, disability, aging, and family relationships.

• Kublaiklan Is a curatorial collective that explores widely accessible ways of interacting with photography by designing exhibitions and educational projects for non-profit organizations, institutions, and individuals. At the same time, it investigates contemporary visual culture through research projects aimed at building awareness and promoting a conscious use of photography as a language.

• Enrica De Cian is a professor of environmental economics at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Department of Economics, and a research scientist at the Fondazione Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici and at the European Institute on Economics and the Environment. She is a member of the scientific committee at the New Institute Center for Environmental Humanities, and is the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant for the project ENERGYA (“Energy use for Adaptation”), the results of which will be summarized during the exhibition. At Ca’ Foscari, she also coordinates the PhD in Science and Management of Climate Change.

• Antonella Mazzone is a research associate at the Centre for the Environment (University of Oxford) and a fellow at Oxford Martin School. With a background in humanities and social science, her current work focuses on the interplay between gender, cultures, and indigenous knowledge in energy studies.
• Elementsix is an agency specialized in research dissemination and in providing services to academics from diverse fields. Elementsix and Gaia Squarci supervised the curation of the photographic shoots and associated stories, and coordinated, together with Enrica De Cian, the scientific writing for the exhibition and the catalog.

Photographs by Gaia Squarci