Air Conditions
Lisa van Heyden
Enno Pötschke and Lisa van Heyden are based between Amsterdam and Berlin, combining backgrounds in visual communication and architecture. They met at the Sandberg Instituut’s Studio for Immediate Spaces in 2023, where they began a collaborative practice shaped by shared interests in spatial research, ecological urgencies and critical engagement with infrastructural space.
With a background in graphic design, Enno Pötschke's recent sculpture and video works invest in the close narration of materials enlisted in and by extractive economies. In his current research, focused on aggregates such as sand and concrete, he tracks these materials across industries, framing their shape-shifting qualities in relation to economic demands. His work highlights the fragility of social and environmental networks that are too often crushed by the weight of unsustainable material circulation.
Lisa’s practice navigates the intersection of architecture and art, focusing on invisible infrastructures and the environmental narratives they carry. In her ongoing research, she examines air and conditioning as climatic and cultural systems, and how our notions of comfort influence our environments and ways of living. Through spatial interventions, she exposes the ecological and social systems embedded within these infrastructures.
Together, they integrate these perspectives to question and reimagine the relationships between material, space and socio-ecological conditions.
"I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord." – Phil Collins
Air conditioning is often perceived as a neutral technology providing comfort and stability. But conditioned air is not just air, it's engineered, modified, commodified. Globally, 2 billion AC units consume over 10% of electricity and emit more than 1 billion tons of CO₂ annually.
With demand expected to triple by 2050, this infrastructure is becoming a major driver of climate change. By making interiors cooler we are heating up the planet. The result is a growing paradox: the more comfortable the interior becomes, the more uncomfortable, unstable and uninhabitable the exterior gets.
Our project Air Conditions is a spatial research initiative focussing on the infrastructures of air by tracing how air circulates through buildings, bodies and economies. The project questions the division of interior and exterior and critically explores the global expansion of cooling technologies and their ecological, geopolitical and bodily impacts in order to rethink notions of comfort, atmosphere and control.
We envision a design-research installation grounded in a strong curatorial framework. Starting with the refrigerant as a material and symbolic carrier of meaning, the work opens up multiple entry points into the politics of air conditioning. It’s a deeply investigative project that brings together material research and cultural narratives through crafted and immersive spatial forms.
It visualises airflows and materialise the conditioning cycle, combining artefacts, air-moving mechanisms and constructed environments to make climate control infrastructures visible. It is accompanied by mapping and archival investigations into global and local cooling systems, a visual and textual publication and a series of performative formats such as walks and talks, developed in the context and dialogue with the LINA Members.
