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Paper short abstract

In the context of decarbonisation, institutional energy systems' change lags behind the inventiveness of everyday life assemblages. Here, practices of creative rediscovery, recycling and care produce "primitive technologies" that are low-carbon but also enable affectively rich experiences of energy.

Paper long abstract

Many debates today centre around how people's lives might be impacted by, and react to, infrastructural changes in energy provision systems towards decarbonisation. I consider the somewhat opposite case: when institutions lag behind and actors concerned with the environmental sustainability of their own energy practices come up with household-level creative solutions. With the help of ethnographic material from my study on everyday energy transitions in the North East of Italy, I reflect on how practices such as repairing old appliances, care for objects, inventive make-do with recycled materials, re-discovery of traditional energy systems, etc. are deployed to reduce environmental impact. These "primitive technologies" (partially) compensate for the unsustainability of grid energy (mainly based on non-renewables) and resist entrenched carbon-intensive energy consumption and a culture of disposability. Yet arguably, they also offer an alternative to a certain blind chase towards "greening" technological innovation (e.g. "smart technologies") - whose efficacy is nowadays still contested/-able. In the perspective of "assemblages", I investigate primitive technologies as they dynamically emerge out of a coalescing encounter between the affordances of human beings, objects, embodied cultures, systems of meaning - all of which are actualised in a present at the crossroads of past and future lines of becoming. I would also like to reflect, in a psycho-social vein, on how these micro-energy systems become doubly precious as their proximity to the singularity of each livelihood makes them not only sustainable but also affectively intense and therefore a source of enrichment for daily experiences of energy.