SOLAR LABORATORY

The future in contemporary visions is often being colonised by technological complexities that would require even greater amounts of power and resources. Instead of entangling ourselves into power networks and relying completely on supply chains, can we envisage a more independent and resilient future? By combining speculative design tools, making true scale prototypes and rethinking social rituals, the SOLAR LABORATORY workshop will propose alternative scenarios and sustainable infrastructures.

In the first five-day edition of SOLAR LABORATORY in Vilnius, domestic spatial settings and appliances—from showers and hair dryers to coffee machines and ovens—will become our testing ground. While learning and applying the knowledge of optics, we will research and develop domestic objects and rituals. How could taking hot showers, blow-drying hair, making coffee or even baking bread be performed by harnessing, reflecting, concentrating, absorbing and converting direct solar energy?

Transforming ordinary objects to re-power domestic rituals will spark critical reflections on our dependence on conventional energy sources. The laboratory of solar curiosities proposes grounds for discussion to explore sustainable alternatives that would consider our daily domestic rituals and questions of reproductive labour.

SOLAR LABORATORY will include lectures, field trips and design exercises, as well as engagement with a broader audience through public programmes involving film screenings and presentations of the process and results.

The workshop is an international collaboration between the Zurich-based architecture collective inter-, non-profit organisation Architektūros fondas, SODAS 2123 cultural centre and Vilnius Academy of Arts.