Biennial of the Sun 2025
Designer Marjan van Aubel and fashion designer Pauline van Dongen have jointly formulated the Solar Manifesto, presenting their perspective on the role of design facing towards the Sun on the occasion of the first Biennial of the Sun (held in 2022 in collaboration with the Nieuwe Instituut as part of Dutch Designweek in Eindhoven, the Netherlands). The relationship between designers and the Sun is not a frequent topic in design discourse. We can ask ourselves questions about some of the theses and radical claims that van Aubel and van Dongen formulate. We can also question the validity of the manifestos today. Nevertheless, the Biennial of the Sun, which is currently in its second year, is proving to be an interesting platform for thinking about design and its roles in today’s world.
Marjan van Aubel and Pauline van Dongen are still actively creating and thinking about solar issues, developing their visions through their own work presented at this year’s Sun Biennale, but also through publications. The themes of the Sun and solar energy have a fundamental influence on their work. Van Dongen creates textiles that produce energy from sunlight, while Marjan van Aubel explores the Sun from different aspects. She brings immersive experiences that allow viewers to look at our star in new ways. She also published the book Solar Futures: How to Design a Post-Fossil World with the Sun, where she puts her visions of solar futures into dialogue with technological, social and political concepts. The designers yield the second Sun Biennale to curator Scott Longfellow and researcher Rafaël Santianez from the Musée cantonal de design et d’arts appliqués contemporains (MUDAC) in Lausanne, Switzerland. The collaboration with MUDAC has enabled a longer duration and scope for the solar design exhibition, which this year symbolically runs from the spring to autumn equinox, i.e. from March 21 to September 21, 2025.
Longfellow and Santianez decided to name this year Sun·s (in French Soleil·s), thus pointing to the different visions of this star that are reflected in our thinking and cultures. The biennial has grown in scope under their curatorial management. Soleil·s has the ambition to cover the topic of the connection between design and the Sun from five different perspectives. They have therefore organised the exhibition into five units, which also indicate five different types of relationships between design and the Sun. These circles are energetic revitalisation, heliotropism, symbolic gravitation, transition·s and returns. Pragmatic, almost scientific-technological responses to the energy, ecological and social crises associated with the Sun appear alongside speculative projects. This has allowed the curators to avoid manifesto directions and visions that seem detached from current or future realities without bypassing more daring thought experiments. The five sections of the Solar Design Show guide us through various works, both historical and contemporary, in which the Sun is a central theme.
However, the curators of the Sun Biennial, Scott Longfellow and Rafaël Santianez, invite us to look beyond pragmatic immediate solutions. They show us the potential in architecture and design, and they strive to refresh our opinions and views of the world. They hold up a mirror to our nonsensical beliefs, taken-for-granted opinions, harmful visual preferences or habits. They do not aspire to change or moralise them, but rather to direct our attention to places that often remain shrouded in darkness. They illuminate places where the Sun usually does not penetrate, but where the potential for fundamental personal or societal discoveries lies.
