Storytelling and Worldmaking

The turns toward solarities, present and future, are not solely material turns. This transition requires new stories, myths, and forms of (en)visioning and imagining the world. Stories and myths are tools of immense possibility that provide powerful means of creating different worlds and making new futures, and of seeing the present in new ways. The stories we tell of solar pasts, presents, and futures are crucial means of unsettling received knowledge, reviving forgotten and occluded histories, and building future worlds. As Ruha Benjamin put it in a recent lecture, “imagination is a contested field of action.”1 Imagination, story, and art are inherently political; they are integral to material and experiential life and hold lessons and tools for building new worlds. Here we present a few examples of artistic, fictional, and speculative solarian worlds as prompts and examples of the imaginative possibilities of solarity.

Olafur Eliasson’s installation The Weather Project opened in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2003. As its title suggests, the installation was an attempt to explore the experience of the weather by bringing it into the museum. The installation reproduced the mists and clouds of London’s streets in Turbine Hall to give visitors a chance to reflect on the ways in which cities mediate their experiences of weather. However, this aim of the project was likely lost on most people who came to the Tate. The real attraction was the giant, bright orange-yellow sphere that Eliasson placed near the ceiling, and perhaps, too, the huge mirror on the ceiling that reflected everything back at viewers. It was the sun that came into the gallery, and there was no doubt that this is what everyone came to see. Visitors sprawled on the ground, turning the floor of Turbine Hall into a Mediterranean beach. In the rays of hundreds of monofrequency lamps, they came inside seeking warmth and light and to commune with a sun that they rarely found present with such intensity in the skies above London. The Weather Project is a misnomer for this installation. A better name might be “Solarity.”

Reviewers and critics of Eliasson’s faux sun pointed to the ways in which it worked to rewire actions and expectations, cutting through the apparent rationality of a busy London workday and providing those who dropped in with “new kinds of engagement with a world fraught with social and environmental concerns.”2 Eliasson sees it as “a subject that implied ‘community’ and that was open-ended. Predicting weather is one way we collectively try to avoid the unforeseeable, which our lives are always about. The weather is a subject about which a community may also permit a high degree of disagreement: I can say ‘I hate the rain,’ you say, ‘I love it,’ and you may still think I am a nice guy.”3 Many critics drew connections to the sublime or to sun worshipping and pointed to Eliasson’s implied critique of modernity via the weather: it is now the only place in which city-dwelling humanity ever encounters anything like “nature.” Not all are positive about the solar experiment carried out in The Weather Project. Louise Hornby points out that the installation’s focus on “an ecology of individual encounter and feeling situate[s] the experiencing subject at the center, providing an analogue to the human centering that marks the era of the Anthropocene.”4 Hornby notes that the sun in the Tate actually offered no warmth and that the subjects lying on the ground together were interested in looking at their reflections on the roof—hardly the beginnings of a collectivity organized in relation to the challenges and promises of the solar. Complicating matters further, the piece had been installed in a setting that, at the time, was sponsored by BP, one of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies.5

The process of developing a relation to the sun and its energy will involve missteps as much as steps forward. To make it work at all, we need to be humble, relinquishing the desire for mastery and perfection. We need to be alert to the fact that we can get it wrong (because we have gotten it wrong) and that we need the collective ideas and insights of people willing to share their diverse knowledges and experiences of plural solarities. In particular, we need to make way for what Macarena Gómez-Barris calls “submerged perspectives,”6 which are described as emerging in and from “realms of differently organized reality that are linked to, yet move outside of, colonial boundaries . . . submerged perspectives that perceive local terrains as sources of knowledge, vitality and livability.” Such perspectives “reveal a differently perceivable world, an intangible space of emergence, where rivers converge into the flow and muck of life otherwise.”7 To perceive solarity otherwise will require that we seek out, care for, and listen and respond to submerged perspectives wherever we might encounter them.

These perspectives are more nearby than we might think. “Solarity: After Oil School” took place on the traditional and unceded territories of the Kanien’kehá:ka people of the Haudenosaunee nations. In the machinima titled She Falls for Ages,8 Haudenosaunee Mohawk artist and scholar Skawennati tells the story of Sky World, a “faraway place” whose people have “harnessed geothermal, wind and solar power and are brilliant botanists.” As the narrator recounts, “one of their greatest creations is the Celestial Tree. Developed over thousands of years of careful cultivation, the tree’s blossoms emit light. In fact, they light the whole world.” The story’s central figure is a telepath named Otsitsakaion. As Skawennati explains, “when she learns that her world is dying, she knows what must be done; she must become the seed of the new world.”9 Sky World is a faraway place, but the work that must be done to reach it starts right here.

Stories like this help us understand what must be done, and what must be undone, in response to a world that is dying. They give us the gift of feeling and thinking otherwise. The advent of solar energy has been treated by many as a wondrous silver bullet, promising a resolution to environmental trauma that will leave much else as it is: soon enough, we will all have ample energy and the powers that come with it, and it will be clean! If only it were so simple. The truth is, “one can still only imagine a world in which seven billion people had equal access to free power and could thereby take hold of their inborn solarity.”10 Innumerable desires are wrapped up in our understanding of the sun and its energies and innumerable historical and material obstacles standing in the way of those desires. These desires extend from hopes that we might adopt radically different ways of being in relation to one another and to the nonhuman others with whom we share the planet, to fantasies of powering extractivist capitalism on the cheap. Solarity is thus a space of ethical indeterminacy and political struggle, a structure of desire in which energy, climate, and attachments to infrastructure converge in contested spaces of imagined and material transition. As Rhys Williams observes in the context of solarpunk science fiction, “if energy transition is to be a battle of hearts and minds as much as PV panels and lithium batteries, a serious engagement with energy imaginaries is the means to understanding and marshalling them.”11 The problems and opportunities that might develop as a result of the advent of a solar world need to be at the center of our questioning and our struggles. These are seeds of new worlds that we must cultivate with care, and this work is ongoing. It is the work of the time we will spend together.

In envisioning a possible framework for solarity that might be inclined to support solidarity and environmental responsibility, we might also look beyond ideals of work and labor toward games and play. How do we build a revolutionary solar system that galvanizes multispecies communities in the spirit of sympoetic worldmaking?12 Additionally, how do we conceive of revolution and energy outside of their traditional valences in an effort to build a just solar system—one predicated on the principles of environmental justice?

If the promise of solarity is a promise of better relations between different humans and nonhumans, it must be accompanied by stories, arts, tools, and crafts that celebrate and sustain collective flourishing. Our attention to nonhuman and non-Western kin reveals that many such stories already proliferate: coral, algae, trees, and other sun worshippers already tell us about how to build worlds otherwise. But we must learn to listen. Making new worlds will necessarily involve mistakes, but approaching such a project with humility and a willingness to be wrong, to learn from our solarian comrades across species and cultures, will help us make fewer and less egregious mistakes. In this contemporary moment of cascading planetary crises, we require more responsive and responsible arts of storytelling and worldmaking. We require stories that move away from solitary, individual heroes to multispecies stories that are grown over time, stories that are intertwined with other beings and celebrate not individual feats but the mutual creation of new ecosystems. To thrive collectively requires listening, learning, and making collectively.