Carolin Meyer: 'Solastalgia'

These digital images are the result of an experiment in visualising Solastalgia—a neologism combining the word ‘sol’ for sun and ‘nostalgia’, a melancholia or homesickness for a place of lost time. We learn from a young age that gazing directly into the sun is harmful, and yet we have all done it anyway. The consequence of this small rebellion is a temporary form of blindness, blots of white light blocking our sight and disorientating us. The sun’s immense force is too much for our fragile retinas.

The sun is a source of both life and harm. In recent anthropogenic years, it has overwhelmingly become a symbol of the fear, horror, death made manifest by the ongoing climate crisis. Our nostalgia for a time when the Earth was widely habitable has morphed into paralysis and inaction. These images, rendered digitally and therefore requiring the viewer to gaze into the harmful blue light of a screen, invite an engagement with the duality of beauty and harm. They force us to interrogate our relationship with the digital realm and its representations of, and distractions from, the world around us irreversibly slipping into an unliveable state.

Solastalgia (2023) was shown as part of the open studio event ‘That’s Hot’ on climate change, technocapitalism and interpassivity in Camberwell in 2023.

Carolin Meyer is a multidisciplinary artist & DJ, working at the intersections of art and research and deploying sound, video, sculpture, music, performance, collage, installation, and writing. Driven to create empathy and spark engagement with pressing issues, her multi-sensory and immersive artistic interventions explore ‘the visceral affect’ as a way to cut through the noise. Currently, she is Creative Fellow at UCL, where she explores music as research.