Who feels the wind? Who controls it?

As part of this year’s Experiments’ Platform mentorship programme, I have been researching a phenomenon of atmospheric exhaustion within urban environments. Over the past three months, working on my experiment The Windcatcher for Exhausted Winds has been a deeply transformative experience both intellectually and personally. Together with my mentor, Indrė Umbrasaitė, I embarked on a fascinating journey that began with my inquiry into global terrestrial stilling and evolved into a layered investigation of ventilation systems, atmospheric fatigue and the politics of wind in cities. Through this process, I’ve had to invent my own tools, language, and methodologies of sensing, and in doing so, I’ve learned to observe the city and the air around me in entirely new ways.

The project began from a place of urgency. I had been researching the decline in average wind speeds – a slow, largely unnoticed shift with wide reaching consequences, including its impact on renewable energy production. What struck me was how something as massive and planetary as wind could be both taken for granted and overlooked until it no longer functioned as expected. This paradox led me to question: How does this global phenomenon manifest locally? Can we feel, measure, or even catch a tired wind?

Amsterdam West became my research ground, and walking turned into my primary mode of experimentation. I began to practice methodological mapping by walking with the wind, allowing it to guide me to encounters with human-generated airflow systems – what I came to identify as “anthropogenic wind”. These walks allowed me to discern points where two air systems met: natural surface winds and exhausted air expelled from vents and ducts of buildings’ HVAC systems.

This intuitive approach led me to create the Wind Fatigue Assessment Scale – a perceptive framework, in contrast to traditional systems like the Knot scale or Beaufort scale, which allowed me to explore a different kind of wind in urban surroundings. Using my camera as a research tool, I discovered exhaustion wind sites in Rembrandt Park in Amsterdam West, where dozens of vents emerged across residential buildings. I documented these through photogrammetry, images and film. There was something paradoxical, even poetic, about these massive metal vents standing quietly within a green park landscape, as if Rembrandt himself might not mind their coexistence with nature.

During this first phase, I began to see wind not as passive or invisible, but as shaped – by design, infrastructure, and intention. Our built environment breathes, but it breathes through machines — relentlessly, and in ways that feel increasingly mechanical and extractive. The anthropogenic winds generated by subways, fans, and cooling systems aren’t just byproducts; they are active agents, often disrupting or displacing natural wind flows. This led me to question the ethical dimensions of air: Who controls it? Who feels it? And how is it altered by our material abundance?

Perhaps the most meaningful realisation I’ve had during this time is that wind can be more than data – it can be a story, a witness, even a metaphor for systemic exhaustion. This project is still ongoing, therefore, I continue my exploratory walks through the city with the wind, more attuned curious and aware of the air that surrounds and sustains us.