The Sun, ‘mother’ star of the solar system around which various bodies, including the Earth, revolve, whose fusion core produces energy and releases electromagnetic radiation, a flow of particles and neutrinos. In 2024, a surge of this radiation caused a storm capable of disrupting electrical grid transmissions on Earth.
Located in the Orion Arm, the Sun not only significantly influences the climate on Earth, but is also the protagonist of recurring cosmogonic visions – from the ancient Egyptians, to pre-Columbian civilizations, to Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun – that place it at the center of religious and political systems as a source of irradiation and emanation (of life, power, knowledge). Studied and venerated, it has inspired various architectural works and projects that dedicate spaces and territories to it, such as the megalithic monuments built with consideration to its position during the summer solstice, or the Temple of Kukulkan in Mexico, designed to project snake-shaped shadows during the equinoxes. This ancient tradition of observing the solstices continued, for example, with the land artwork Observatory created by Robert Morris in 1971 in Flevoland, as highlighted by Rosalind Krauss: ‘Morris had begun to think about the structures both made (like Stonehenge) and found (like caves) by prehistoric societies to convert the arc of the sun’s revolutions into the straight line of the intelligible, arrowlike trajectory, and thus to ‘read’ the solstices. Observatory (1971) is a massive project through which to think and to experience this culturally ancient notion of marking, which is to say, of entering into a text that one has not oneself written, and that will continue to be produced to the end of solar time’.
