Olafur Eliasson’s fascination with natural light led him to illuminate the Tate Gallery in London with a giant fake sun 13 years ago.
Since that debut before the wider public, the Danish-Icelandic artist has made hundreds of thousands of small plastic suns that not only bring solar light to the darkest corners of the earth, but also fired up an entire green power movement.
“The idea is that you can achieve a lot with very little,” he says.
Eliasson, 49, is sitting in his spacious, light-filled studio in Berlin’s trendy Prenzlauer Berg district on a sunny autumn day.
Around his neck he wears a yellow plastic light designed like a large sunflower-like pendant with a small solar panel on the back. If charged for five hours during the day, after sunset it will emit four hours of bright light from the inbuilt LED lamp. Or 10 hours of dimmed light.
In partnership with engineer Frederik Ottersen, Eliasson powered up the “Little Sun” project in 2012 and now has 20 people working at the start-up’s offices in Berlin. They recently released their latest innovation, a solar lamp with attached charger that powers cell phones, all financed through a crowd-funding campaign.
There is huge demand for such devices in the world today. According to the United Nations, in 2014, 1.3 billion people still did not have access to electricity.
“This creates huge economic, environmental, social and health problems,” explains the business development manager of “Little Sun”, Felix Hallwachs.
The 39-year-old recalls a trip he made to rural Rwanda, where a coffee plantation worker told him that her child has a constant cough and eye problems from doing his homework beside a kerosene lamp in the evening.
The old-style lamps also cost a lot because of their fuel consumption.
“She asked me, ‘How can we tackle this together, so that I can provide my village with solar lamps?’” Hallwachs says.
This simple request touched on another concept behind “Little Sun”, since the team also aims to boost local economies. “We try to employ the concept of ‘trade not aid’,” stresses the manager. “This means we try with local partners to determine ways to create a ‘social business’.”
In developed countries you can buy the “Little Sun” in museum shops for about 25 dollars (Bt 875), for example in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. This allows the makers to subsidise sales of the lamps in developing countries, where they go for half this price at markets or local shops, or can even be bartered for a commodity like a chicken.
As well as offering instant improvement to normal domestic life, the Little Sun lamps also do their bit in crisis situations.
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, a friend of Eliasson’s, ordered 1,700 of them for distribution before he visited a refugee camp in the Greek islands. They also got plenty of use after the devastating earthquake in Nepal in 2015.
More than 440,000 units have been sold since the lamp’s launch four years ago, including more than 241,000 in areas without electricity, reducing emissions of carbon dioxide by more than 25,000 tons, according to the makers.
In April 2014, Bloomberg Philanthropies invested US$5 million in the project, making it possible for the Little Sun brand to expand on the African continent.
Dutch company WakaWaka uses a similar concept in its solar-powered flashlight launched in 2012.
Under the motto “Share the sun,” it sold more than 225,000 units in 47 countries. In four years the start-up estimates that this source of clean power cut CO2 emissions by 248,000 tons.
For Eliasson, who has strong ties with Africa and currently teaches at the university in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, Little Sun is a labour of love. And just because it is functional doesn’t mean it can’t have an artistic element, he points out.
Designing this unpretentious piece meant as much to him as his other work, says Eliasson, especially because it yielded an extra, fundamental joy.
“As a widely exhibited artist, I operate in a milieu that became very exclusive and elitist,” he says of the circles he usually deals with. “So I’m all the happier that this is also an artwork in itself that people can buy for a small price.”