Sundial is a site-specific installation realized for Supergau Festival 2023 exploring the relationship between the human body and landscape. Precisely oriented in the space of Lungau’s landscape, it works as an astronomical naked-eye device, observing the sun’s circadian cycles and the heliotropism of flowers.
Project Name: Sundial
Studio Name: Maetherea
Location: Mariapfarr, Lungau, Salzburg, Austria
Photographer: Giulia Maretti Studio
It is a precarious architecture investigating the themes of ephemerality, matter, time and uncertainty.
“Our research refers to primordial architectures recalling human presence in the landscape. It moves from the existing examples of archaeoastronomical structures – ancient human attempts to measure space and time – to artefacts built with elementary gestures in the landscape. Both typologies of creations focus on the vacuum: architecture is just a fragile outline that alludes to the presence of man, the landscape instead appears as an immutable presence.”
The composition is based on centric figures, recurrent shapes developed from the centre and two main axes (north-south, east-west). Geometry is the key to understanding the circadian rhythm through light and shadows and relating it to time. In this way, an ephemeral structure becomes a naked-eye observatory.
Sundial is a gesture in the landscape that works as a natural device, including the phenological observation of heliotropic characteristics of vegetal species. Different species of heliotropic flowers in bloom create a vegetal clock. Slowly tracking the sun’s path across the sky, these flowers are believed to use heliotropism to improve pollination, fertilisation, and seed development.
“You are invited to stop by to take your space. Sundial invites you to position your body in relationship to the movements of the Sun in the sky and to the landscape of Mariapfarr in Lungau. You are welcome to take your time and observe the movement of the shadows and the flowers following the sun.”
Maetherea is a multidisciplinary creative practice based in London. Working internationally on Public Art and Environmental Design, it aims to create sustainable landscape design and art installations. Our work creates spaces that change through time, unifying performances of matter with natural and artificial phenomena.
