Absence/ Presence. full filmAbsence/Presence/ staring at the sun 2024/2025
20 minutes, 2-channel video installation, parts of it have been co-funded during a research Residency at AADK Spain with the support of Goethe Institute
Staring at the Sun in Times of Darkness explores the volatile thresholds between absence and presence, tracing the elemental relation between water, desertification, and solar force. Part of Julia Flux’s wider speculative cosmology on human–sun entanglements, the work examines how bodies, minerals, and landscapes are continually reshaped by intensifying solar rhythms.
Filmed across deserts and salinas, the installation moves through the slow choreography of evaporation and emergence, where water’s disappearance becomes form, and salt crystallization becomes a mineral record of solar touch. Here, desertification is understood not solely as ecological loss but as a metabolic process, a planetary transition that mirrors transformations within the human body itself.
Across two channels, Flux stages the body as a solar sensorium—a vessel attuned to electromagnetic fields, mineral memory, and the shifting architectures of light. Presence becomes porous; absence becomes a sculptural event. Movement unfolds as a mode of orientation within instability, a mapping of resilience inspired by both spiritual technologies and solar physics.
As a chapter within Flux’s larger cosmographic framework, the work proposes the Sun not as a metaphor but as an active collaborator: a radiant force shaping perception, myth-making, and the future conditions of life. In a time marked by climatic and societal flux, Staring at the Sun in Times of Darkness invites viewers to inhabit the subtle terrain where dissolution becomes continuity, and where deserts—inner and outer—emerge as laboratories for imagining ancient futures.
A fragemented one-channel video screening of the research at Floating University, during the Lios Lab Free Radicals Residency, Autumn 2024
Third Landscape Beings: Amplifying Absence and Presence
At the intersection of art, ecology, and community, the residency investigated the concept of absence and presence, centering the amplification of both heard and unheard, present and ghostly voices of third landscape beings. The concept of the Third Landscape originates from French landscape architect and thinker Gilles Clément; introduced it in his book Manifesto of the Third Landscape (Manifeste du Tiers Paysage):
These beings inhabit overlooked, marginal spaces that exist at the periphery of human control and intervention, such as urban wastelands, roadsides, and abandoned lands. They thrive in spaces of neglect, where nature reclaims and persists in forms that often go unnoticed. These beings embody dynamic, symbiotic relationships in the borderlands of ecological transition, offering opportunities for co-regulation and mutual care.
Through the framework of the residency, the aim was to cultivate a soft collective body, exploring the unique capacities of third landscapes to foster symbiotic relationships and reimagine shared futures. These borderlands, teeming with life and potential, serve as spaces for reparative world-building. In this project, we created space within refuges for community co-regulation with our more-than-human kin, supporting the wellbeing of our collective nervous system. By shedding the urban "exoskeleton," we reconnected with the deeper, interwoven dynamics of our world, moving toward a state of exchange and reciprocity that includes all beings sharing this planet.
Informed by previous work and experiments in ecological and artistic spaces, this project invited reflections on the importance of these marginal spaces, where absence becomes presence, and where the unheard voices of third landscape beings can be amplified. This exploration offers a unique opportunity to rethink how these neglected ecosystems—often seen as spaces of decay—can inspire creative, ecological, and social regeneration, shaping a more inclusive future for all life on Earth.