Dimming the sun with Vasilis Papageorgiou

What are the connotations of the sun amid the climate crisis? Is it a symbol for life, energy, exhaustion, or decay? Does it evoke an image of an archetypical summer day or of an orange-gray sky darkened by wildfire smoke? Does it inspire a feeling of longing to lie on a sunbed or of distress over prolonged heat waves?

The idea of the sun evokes conflicting images, memories, and emotions depending on where one lives or travels, and on one’s affordances and opportunities. Bodies across the planet do not experience the sun in the same way. For some, it is tied to summer leisure; for others, to endless hours of labor. The sun structures time and life itself and is entangled with a history of tourism that involves its own asymmetries and divisions. The impact of overtourism on seaside areas today emphasizes the need to reconsider our roles as guests or hosts, vacationers or workers. It calls for forms of rest, relief, and regeneration that go beyond capitalist systems of pleasure based on the exhaustion of human and planetary resources.

Dimming the Sun is a hybrid event, with the recent publication “Sunseekers or Dimming the Sun or” by Vasilis Papageorgiou as a starting point. It includes a discussion, a performance, a sculptural and video installation, and the book itself, shedding light on the challenges of building different narratives for the upcoming summers.