WHY SOLARPUNK?

Spreading organically through social media around the world, the term ‘solarpunk’ is a modality of dreaming real-life constructive change. Googling ‘solarpunk’ yields a complex interdisciplinary heritage that meshes literature, art and ecocritical traditions with contemporary technological innovation in the energy sector and urban planning fields. Not yet institutionalized and somewhat anarchist, Solarpunk sensibilities, knowledge, and attitudes can serve as the lodestar for an art school built around the realities of climate emergency. Solarpunk can be imagined as a sustainable network structure of ideas, sensibilities and values, a Black Mountain College of the future.

WHY RJUKAN?
 
With its recent claim to fame in the Rjukan Sunmirror – arguably the most famous Norwegian piece of art since Edvard Munch`s paintings, Rjukan is an ideal location for the Solarpunk Academy. Because its fame is located largely outside of the art sector, it is an ideal model for a new mode of art produced based on a new logic: the organic potential of contemporary worldwide communication oriented towards people. Rjukan itself is the counter-intuitive product of industrial hubris, a glittering Atlantis in the wilderness, like a miniature Dubai or Murmansk. It is both a Disneyland of industrial-technological innovation in the energy sector and – as the only Norwegian “company town” – a condensed city museum from the early days of industrial modernity. Essentials are within walking distance, and there is little around besides essentials. The UNESCO protected architecture rules out most contemporary chain stores. The lack of common brands within the city makes Rjukan a strange escape from neoliberalism and urban normality, creating a setting from which to imagine new worlds and different ways of organizing society.

Rjukanfossen, the hydropower plant the city was originally built around, symbolizes the beginning of institutionalized Norwegian art history. In the Romantic period, when painters across the continent were wandering in search of noble savages and the sublime and seeking to escape industrial pollution in the big cities, Rjukanfossen became the most prominent destination in Norway. This helped spark Norwegian art institutions, its tourist industry, and the Norwegian sense of self that led to liberation from Sweden. Today, the sharp contrast between the ambitious architecture of the little town and the Pleistocene landscape of the surrounding mountains makes it an “Anthropocene Diorama”, where the sense of the unreal can spur the imagination. Despite its stunning architecture, the lowest housing prices in Norway ensure affordability, a key element in making Rjukan a solarpunk convening place.

 

WHAT KIND OF ACADEMY?
 
The institutionalized art world, like the rest of contemporary society, has been shaped by the logic of our fossil fuel economy.
The transition and transformations demanded by the current crises will also demand profound changes to most aspects of how art is produced, transported, displayed, communicated, bought and sold. Sustainable transitions of human infrastructure will involve multilayered transitions in all the things we today understand in the sphaere of arts and culture, the frameworks of human creativity. The shape and form is yet to come, and this Academy intend to stay tuned. 

Martin Andersen & Margrethe Kolstad Brekke, 

Rjukan, Norway, January 2020.

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Thanks to Alicia Cohen, Poet, Portland, USA and Siddharth Sareen, Post Doc, Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation, Bergen

 

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​Rjukan Solarpunk Academy (RSA) was initiated in 2019

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Officially registered as an NGO in 2019, with Sun Mirror artist Martin Andersen and artist Margrethe Kolstad Brekke, who had recently relocated to Rjukan, on the board.

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From 2019 to 2023, RSA grew organically, sycronized with the renovation and transformation of the historic Rjukan Varelager into a cultural venue.

 

Our main activities during this period included:

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• Establishing a hub and community for visiting artists (since 2019)

• Opening a cultural café at Rjukan Varelager (since 2020)

• Developing art projects with local children and youth (since 2019)

• Introducing the concept of “Solarpunk” into academic settings. Through various collaborative projects,  for example as a partner in the research school Empowered Futures, which brought PhD students from across Europe to Rjukan to explore the theme “Complexities and Conflict in Energy Transition”. In this context, Rjukan—literally built in the backyard of industrial energy infrastructure and surrounded by breathtaking nature—became a living framework for academic inquiry.

• Exploring the intersection of art and science through a festival pilot, conceptualized in spring 2022 in collaboration with USN cultural management student Milja Silvan.

• Signing a cooperation agreement with the Norwegian Industrial Workers Museum following the festival. As part of this, Hilde Widvey became involved in RSA, and in January 2025 she joined the board.

• Also following the 2023 festival, Daniel Nyiri began working with RSA and joined the board in January 2025.

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Today, RSA is recognized as both an important cultural player in the local community and a known name in the national visual arts field.

We receive an overwhelming number of inquiries: about the Sun Mirror, which still attracts international media attention; from artists seeking broader opportunities and visibility; from grassroots activists all kinds of people  interested in “Solarpunk”, where we are the most prominent Norwegian actor.

And from local residents in Rjukan and Tinn, who wish to see cultural activities in Rjukan Varelager, a building deeply rooted in the town’s collective identity.

By the summer of 2025, we realized that this had simply become too much for a small volunteer organization with no permanent funding and only four board members. To move forward, we see the best solution as initiating a network of smaller organizations, collaborating across disciplines and sharing resources.

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