Reykjavík Grapevine - 15.08.2014, Blaðsíða 12

12
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 12 — 2014
Art | Functional
It may therefore come as a surprise
that his newest venture is a relatively
unassuming solar-powered lamp that
measures roughly five inches across.
Little Sun is the name he and his de-
sign partner—and the company’s
co-founder—Frederik Ottesen gave
the yellow plastic lamp, which looks
somewhat like a 3D model of a child’s
drawing of the sun.
Sipping coffee in
Addis Ababa
“Frederik and myself were having cof-
fee with a German engineer friend
of ours in Addis Ababa and chatting
about design when said German en-
gineer told us that here in Africa, we
shouldn’t worry about the design of
the thing, just make sure it works,”
Ólafur tells me when I enquire about
the design of Little Sun. “It struck me
then that this is the general attitude of
people from the Western world work-
ing in Africa. There is this condescend-
ing and stigmatizing view that people
in Africa only care about functionality
and not about pleasure. I disagree. I
think everyone in the world wants to
have beautiful things in their lives.
Why do we live in a society where peo-
ple in the Western world keep patron-
izing the continent of Africa?”
Ardent not to adhere to their Ger-
man friend’s principles, Ólafur and
Frederik set out to make something
“beautiful and emotional,” Ólafur
explains. “What is important is the
unifying nature of the Little Sun. We
wanted to make something that is just
as pleasing to children and grown-ups,
whether they’re in Iceland or Ethio-
pia. It’s about being the same, not dif-
ferent.”
Thus, Little Sun was born. Whilst
the lamp is a small item in itself,
the company’s ambitions are fairly
grandiose. Their mission is twofold.
Firstly, to supply a cheap, reliable and
environmentally friendly light source
to some of the 1.6 billion people in the
world who don’t have access to elec-
tricity, and in the meantime provide
entrepreneurial opportunities to com-
munities by training salespeople and
help getting their businesses of the
ground. Secondly, the company main-
tains that selling Little Suns to “off-
grid” communities benefits them in a
multitude of ways.
The lamp acts as
a replacement for
hazardous and
polluting kerosene
lamps, and by do-
ing so can help
children study, al-
low businesses to
stay open longer,
provide more op-
portunities for
people to socialize,
and so on and so
forth. To make the
lamp affordable
to “off-grid” com-
munities, the company subsidizes the
lamps by selling them at a premium in
countries that do have access to power.
The profits of those sold to people on
the grid help to pay for the ones sold
off the grid.
Ólafur calls this unique business
model an “entrepreneurial social busi-
ness.”
“First of all, we couldn’t afford
to just give them away”, he tells me
when I ask him why they didn’t opt
for a more traditional aid organisation
model. “Besides, if we were to give the
Little Sun away, the small electronics
shop owner down the road from where
we sat in Addis Ababa would go out of
business.”
Instead Ólafur went to the owner
of said electronics store and asked him
to be their partner and help them sell
the lamps in the city. Fasil, the shop
owner, agreed to help out and has
since then sold Little Suns in Addis
Ababa.
Fasil and the Milanese
art elite
“I then told Fasil that I was going
to Milan for a Little Sun event. We
were doing a similar thing as we’re
doing in Iceland right now. We had a
launch there with a pop-up store and
a party and so on. Anyway, Fasil was
very excited about the whole thing
and wanted to come with us to Milan,
as he loved the prod-
uct and was look-
ing forward to be-
ing our partner and
working with us. In
the end the venture
proved way too ex-
pensive for him, as
he is a small-scale
businessman, but
in his mind he was
fully capable of join-
ing us for a party in
Milan.”
Ólafur then
shared Fasil’s story
with the art elite in
Milan and his audience insisted on
partying for Fasil. “And that’s the dif-
ference between someone like Fasil
and the great people in Milan,” he tells
me. “Fasil was creating a project with
the people in Milan, and the people in
Milan were creating a project for Fasil.
I realised that the distance from Ethi-
opia to Italy is much shorter than the
distance from Italy to Ethiopia.”
“I feel there is a need to change the
way we think about things,” Ólafur
continues. “In my mind we’re all on
the same boat. Of course, the conti-
nent of Africa is to a great extent de-
pendent on the rest of the world, but
I think we’re all dependent on Africa.
We shouldn’t be focusing on each oth-
er’s differences but rather on how we
are all dependent on each other.”
The personal
power station
Little Sun’s social business model has
so far been successful. Multiple part-
nerships with NGOs and public offices
as well as the private sector (including
a collaboration with vodka brand Ab-
solut at the Coachella festival in Cali-
fornia) have helped the company ship
close to 200,000 lamps all over the
world and set up shop in eight coun-
tries in sub-Saharan Africa. But when
talking to Ólafur, you get the feeling
they’re just getting started.
“We set out to change this afore-
mentioned somewhat condescending
mindset of the traditional aid indus-
try,” to create, as the project’s website
calls it “a work of art that works in
life.” Ólafur goes on: “In general, cul-
ture enjoys a lot of trust. It’s reliable
and transparent, and most important-
ly often ‘bottom up.’ It’s based on the
local opinion makers, creatives and
so on, and this is what I try to bring
into the Little Sun economic model.
A trust- or caring-economy. Trust is a
robust currency.”
Furthermore, Ólafur maintains
that this little solar-powered lamp
has an educational quality, one with
the potential to change people’s view
on energy consumption. “Iceland is
a great example. In Iceland it’s really
difficult to understand what energy
actually is. We just look at the plug in
the wall and take it for granted that
it provides energy. I think we need to
ask ourselves this question if we want
to have a sustainable future. We need
to think about what comes out of those
two small holes in the wall.”
Whilst Ólafur admits Little Sun is
a wholly new and unique challenge for
him, he also insists that it’s a very logi-
cal extension of his previous work as
an artist. “I think my art has always
been about making things explicit,” he
explains. “I try to make abstract ideas
understandable and explicit in a tan-
gible way. And now I can make power
explicit. If a child charges the Little
Sun and then uses it on a camping trip,
it realises that the lamp holds the sun
it collected today. You have your own
power station. You make your own en-
ergy. I think it’s an important learning
curve for a child, as when that child
grows up it’s more likely to make a
sane energy choice.”
“The Little Sun is about being pow-
erful. About holding your own power
station in your hands. Instead of talk-
ing about who doesn’t have power let’s
talk about what it feels like to have
power. That feeling is the same in
Reykjavík as it is in Addis Ababa.”
It certainly looks like Ólafur’s little
yellow plastic lamp might just be his
biggest, most ambitious work to date.
The Little Sun pop-up store will
operate out of Söluturn at Lækjar-
torg until September 1.
Internationally renowned artist Ólafur Elíasson has al-
ways been a fan of a spectacle. Whether he's pumping
tens of thousands of litres of water out of New York’s
East River to form waterfalls, painting the rivers of Ja-
pan fluorescent green, or designing the façade of Reyk-
javík’s own concert hall Harpa, his art has always been
imbued with a sense of extravagance.
Everything
Under The
Little Sun
Ólafur Elíasson's new project
makes us think about power,
in many senses of the word
Words by Árni Árnason
Photos by Julia Staples and Maddalena Valeri
“The Little Sun is about
being powerful. About
holding your own pow-
er station in your hands.
Instead of talking about
who doesn’t have power
let’s talk about what it
feels like to have power.
That feeling is the same
in Reykjavík as it is in
Addis Ababa.”
Learn more: www.littlesun.com