Staying cool is a 12-page zine and field manual about urban heat. The publication explores how heat wraps everything equally, how it affects bodies differently, and what people can actually do when the heat is at its highest point. It has been built through a method I call ethnographic condensation: field observations reduced to minimal, diagrammatic climate tactics. For the visual part, it will have three inks and risograph aesthetics. The main dissemination for this piece will be printing and mailing.
Staying cool is being made for diymethods, a postal conference on experimental research methods, where the zine is both the paper and the format. The thing will travel by mail to other participants, which feels right for a manual about learning to survive a climate that is already everywhere.
The zine moves through four zones of vulnerability: exposed bodies, built surfaces, nonhuman companions, and urban vegetation. Each spread combines a short ethnographic fragment with pictures and illustrations. The last page proposes a brief DIY thermal track experiment so whoever reads it can make their own version for their own environmental pressure. Flood, cold, smoke, noise. The method is portable too.
After the conference, the zine will be available for downloading in open access on this site. Printed copies will circulate in Murcia, Barcelona, and Berlin. The Manual is for everyone living inside heat.
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