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Rjukan Solarpunk Academy was established in 2019 by artist Margrethe Kolstad Brekke and artist/ sunmirror initiator Martin Andersen.

The academy has also developed through a growing network of collaborators and board members with different perspectives and areas of expertise. Since 2025, Daniel Nyiri and Hilde Widvey have joined the board, contributing experience from fields ranging from regenerative culture and community-building to local development and cultural engagement.

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The academy grew out of a shared fascination with a simple question:

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What happens when art stops speaking primarily to the art world and begins engaging directly with society?

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Long before Rjukan Solarpunk Academy existed, Martin Andersen had already spent years working to realise the Rjukan Sun Mirror. Inspired in part by Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of Relational Aesthetics, he understood art not primarily as objects, but as relationships, encounters and collective action.

At the time, Relational Aesthetics represented a significant challenge to conventional ideas about contemporary art. It suggested that art could actively participate in shaping social reality rather than merely representing it. Looking back, it is difficult not to wonder whether some of its most ambitious implications were gradually absorbed by the institutions it originally sought to challenge.

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The Rjukan Sun Mirror remains an unusually successful manifestation of that idea. The project required decades of persistence, public debate, technical innovation, political support and unlikely collaborations. What emerged was not only a new landmark, but a demonstration of what can happen when enough people become willing to work towards a shared objective.

The Sun Mirror continues to attract visitors because it reflects sunlight into the town square. What interests us just as much is the process behind it: the way a highly improbable idea gradually moved from speculation to reality. In that process, the collective imagination of what a small community could accomplish was expanded.

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For us, this is where art becomes particularly interesting. Not as a decorative addition to society, but as a form of cultural infrastructure capable of reorganising relationships between people, institutions, technologies and places.

The term Solarpunk entered the conversation in 2019 through discussions with researcher Siddharth Sareen. During a meeting in Bergen, Martin Andersen remarked that the Sun Mirror was, in fact, already a Solarpunk project. The term remained, partly because it offered a useful framework for thinking about the relationship between imagination, technology, culture and long-term societal transformation.

Since 2019, Rjukan Solarpunk Academy has explored how similar forms of cultural infrastructure might emerge in other contexts.

Projects such as Kunstnerleden (The Artist Way) build new pathways between artists, places and communities, creating slower and more meaningful connections between rural and urban cultural life.

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Over the years, the questions surrounding the academy have gradually expanded. The Sun Mirror led to an interest in cultural infrastructure. Kunstnerleden emerged from questions about movement, geography and access to culture. More recently, the work has increasingly engaged with questions of sustainability, resource use and global justice.​

The challenges of the twenty-first century cannot be understood from Europe alone. To activate the full potential of the term Solarpunk, we believe it is necessary to engage with perspectives and perceptions from far beyond the Western world.

Research initiatives such as the Global Justice Project point towards a future where human well-being, ecological limits and global fairness must increasingly be understood together. Through initiatives such as Trust in Humanity, developed in collaboration with partners in India, Rjukan Solarpunk Academy seeks to build new relationships across cultures, knowledge systems and lived realities.

We remain rooted in Rjukan, but our conversations increasingly extend far beyond it.

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How do we expand our sense of what is possible before crisis narrows the horizon?

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