We’ve been observing Solaris a long time. With modern instruments, we’ve been at it for decades. But in some sense, we’ve been trying to figure this place out for hundreds of thousands of years. The more rigorous our investigations, the stranger Solaris becomes. The stranger we become. And in the end: the stranger our message.
Maybe this doesn’t make much sense if you haven’t seen Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi classic, Solaris (1972). But I’m talking about photographer Roberto De Mitri’s Solaris series as well—to the extent, at least, that both have something to say about the importance of остранение, of strange-making, and of expressing what is unique in each of us, however indecipherable.
On Solaris, “Everything seems remote, distant, foreign,” says De Mitri. “Everything feels alien. And that’s because these landscapes originate in us, and we in the universe. And we are always near the horizon of that universe, behind which, nothing of us belongs. Immobility and impermanence: our planet orbits these two suns.”
De Mitri’s photographs take us to the surface of his own strange and wondrous reality. The waters there, and the land masses too, have yet to settle themselves from the “Let there be” of the great Void. Such is the Solaris in you and me too: forever unfinished, volatile, and for all that, utterly sublime.