Solaris
A photographic lens made from desert sand.
‘Solaris’ is a project that emerged from the Atacama Desert, in Chile, the most arid place on Earth. Over time this immense territory has hosted diverse communities, including the Incas, and nowadays impressive telescopes are installed there.
This project takes its inspiration from the 1960’s sci-fi classic ‘Solaris’, by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, which explored a type of intelligence that does not derive from a brain, but, rather, from the self-conscious ocean of a distant planet.
For his version of Solaris, the artist gathered sand in the Atacama Desert and, with the support of experts, melted it into glass.
This glass was then shaped and polished into a photographic lens.
Finally, this "desert eye" was brought back to the Atacama Desert to photograph its landscape, allowing the desert to look upon itself in an act of self-contemplation.
2025 version
Installation view of ‘Solaris’ displaying the desert lens (at the center) and the entire photographic series of the desert taken through that lens.
Display of the photographic lens made from desert sand.
Because all the ecological “impurities” present in the glass were preserved, the resulting lens produced numerous optical anomalies.
Some of the photographs taken with the desert lens.
Solaris
A photographic lens made from sand of the Atacama Desert; and the photographs produced by means of that lens when photographing the same desert
