Stjernhimmeln (the heavenly sky)

3. Agesianax’s Lunar Map

This work brings together two lunar maps based on August Strindberg’s idea of the “transparent moon” as a reflective image of the Earth.
The first map corresponds to the near side of the moon, composed from three of Strindberg’s drawings preserved in archival collections. These drawings were photographed, reworked, and superimposed to form a single composite surface.

The second map represents the far side, a region that remained inaccessible to observation for a long time. It is constructed from Strindberg’s speculative descriptions, reinterpreted through drawing, and combined with contemporary images of the lunar far side produced by recent space missions.

A final layer, printed on black paper, incorporates fragments of Strindberg’s handwritten manuscript describing the idea of a transparent moon.
These three layers are silkscreen-printed onto transparent acrylic plate using pigments made from lunar dust simulant, a material developed for space research based on Apollo-era samples. Although it reproduces the composition of lunar soil, it does not originate from the moon itself. This gap between simulation and origin remains central to this work.

The work enters into dialogue with the nineteenth-century lunar map by James Nasmyth, whose observations were based on repeated telescopic study. Yet even in this attempt at accuracy, representation remains shaped by interpretation and by the limits of perception.

The title refers to Agesianax, a Hellenistic Greek poet known only through fragments preserved by Plutarch. In On the Face in the Moon, he evokes the idea of the moon as a mirror of the Earth:

“Or swell of ocean surging opposite
Be mirrored in a looking-glass of flame.”

Through the interplay of historical imagination, artistic reconstruction, and scientific data, the work unfolds as a question:

How do we produce images of what remains unknown to us, of what we have never directly seen? And where, within these representations, does the boundary lie between projection and reality?

4. Horizon (My World and My God)

In the 1880s, August Strindberg encountered The Conventional Lies of Society (1883) by Max Nordau, a text that led him to question the idea of a spherical Earth. During his travels, he sought to verify this hypothesis through direct observation, studying the horizon with compasses and binoculars from the decks of ships, as described in the autobiography of his wife, Frida Uhl, Marriage with Genius.

These investigations echo, knowingly or not, the experiments of Samuel Birley Rowbotham, whose book Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe (1865) proposed a method based on direct visual observation rather than mathematical reasoning. Both approaches share a mistrust of established science and a fascination with perception, where the horizon becomes both proof and illusion.

Inspired by these studies, this work is constructed from the superimposition of approximately 600 horizon photographs taken during my research travels in 2022, across a trajectory from Lille to the Baltic Sea and beyond. Captured from ferries, buses, and trains, these images are combined with fragments of Strindberg’s writings, personal notes, and drawings based on Rowbotham’s experiments.

The work attempts to reconstruct the photograph of the horizon that Strindberg claimed to have produced, but which never existed. Rather than forming a single, fixed image, the result takes the form of a palimpsest, where traces of travel, thought, and vision accumulate and shift.

The horizon no longer appears as a stable line, but as something in continuous motion. Words become drawings, drawings become images, and images dissolve into something more elusive: a horizon that cannot be fixed, yet persists as an experience shaped by memory and belief.

5. Bee-eye Camera

Among the many ideas explored by August Strindberg was the concept of a “bee-eye camera.” Fascinated by insect vision, particularly that of bees, he attempted to construct an optical device capable of mimicking their compound eye. His approach was simple: placing a mesh textile over a photographic lens. The experiment failed due to the presence of the lens behind the mesh, yet the intuition remained striking. He even sent the resulting image, along with his Celestographs, to Camille Flammarion.

More than a century later, scientists have developed imaging systems inspired by the compound eyes of insects, confirming that Strindberg’s intuition was fundamentally correct, even if his method was not. Rather than filtering a single lens, such systems rely on structures composed of thousands of individual apertures, each capturing a fragment of the visual field.

In this work, I revisit this concept.

The camera is built from 5,000 drinking straws, each functioning as a miniature pinhole. Together, they form a visual field composed of thousands of discrete points, approximating the compound vision of a bee. Through this device, I observed the moon.

The work exists between reconstruction and speculation. It approaches what Strindberg imagined, while grounding that vision in an optical reality that only became possible much later. In this sense, the camera, and its very process, becomes both homage and reinterpretation.

7. Reconstruction of August Strindberg’s Study in 1894 (false archive, 2024)

This work extends the reconstruction of August Strindberg’s study through the form of a false archive.

Drawings developed from multiple sources were first assembled into a digital collage, then translated into a scale model and photographed under the light of the actual moon. The resulting image was further transformed through digital intervention.

Within this image, objects appear that were never part of the model itself. Fragments of original Strindberg objects, preserved at the Strindberg Museum in Stockholm, were inserted into the composition. Once fixed onto the photographic surface, these elements lose their original scale and context. The real objects acquire the same presence as the miniature components of the model, becoming indistinguishable.

The image was then printed as an albumen print, using a photographic technique from Strindberg’s time — the same process through which many of his archival images were produced.

What emerges is not a reconstruction of a place, but an image where distinctions between elements begin to dissolve. In this sense, the work reflects on photography itself: a medium in which everything, once recorded, shares the same visual reality.

8. Moon and Earth, Recomposed Archives (2019 / 2025)

This work originates from astronomy-related cuttings by August Strindberg preserved at the National Library of Sweden. By superimposing illustrations and photographs of the moon and the earth published before 1894, I sought to visualize how these images may have shaped his mental representation of both celestial bodies.

At that time, the moon and the earth did not belong to the same visual regime. The moon had already entered photography, while the earth still existed only through drawings and maps. We did not yet know what our own planet looked like from outside.

Strindberg became preoccupied with a simple question: why did every image of the moon appear as a perfect circle? This doubt extended to the optical device itself. He questioned the circular form of the telescope lens, and by extension, the eye, which he often considered as a lens. If vision already passes through such a structure, how reliable can images be?

The work also draws from a phrase in his manuscript: “The moon is a mirror that reflects the ocean and the earth.” This idea runs throughout his astronomical experiments. In this work, I revisit this belief to explore how representation, repetition, and perception contribute to the formation of his mental vision.

The project exists in two forms.

The first version, created in 2019, takes the shape of a single layered composition. Images of the moon and the earth published before 1894 are superimposed into one surface. The resulting cyanotype, printed on glass with silver and black paint applied behind the image, functions as a mirror, allowing the two bodies to reflect one another.

In 2025, the work was reconfigured as an installation composed of 30 plates, half representing the moon and half the earth. Each plate combines ten historical images into a single surface. Presented in sequence, the plates unfold like lunar phases: contrasts shift, shadows recede, and forms gradually emerge.

This process reflects Strindberg’s way of thinking, where ideas take shape through accumulation, doubt, and repetition. It also echoes Frida Uhl’s accounts of his intense research, oscillating between uncertainty and conviction. At the same time, it mirrors my own method: constructing images from existing fragments, assembling layers of ideas into new constellations.

9. Sunflower
“Gold is nothing less than sunlight photographically fixed.”

This phrase from August Strindberg’s text Le grand Soleil became the starting point for a series of experiments with light and chemistry.

Inspired by this idea, and by the Japanese marbling technique Suminagashi, I began to think of photography as a space where nature, through chemical reaction, could act on its own — through light and chance. This approach is also an homage to Strindberg’s prophetic text The New Arts! or The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation, published in 1894.

During my research travels in 2022, I photographed the sun in each city I visited. Instead of developing these images conventionally, I transformed their material basis: the silver bromide in the film was converted into liquid silver, leaving the image of the sun latent — present, but unseen.

Onto this invisible foundation, I applied Tollens’ reagent, allowing silver to form mirrored patterns on the surface of thickened water. These reactions were then transferred onto photographic paper and developed using a Chromoskedasic Sabattier process, producing unstable metallic tones.
The variations in each image are shaped by external conditions: the intensity of ultraviolet light in each location, and the freshness of the developer. Each work thus becomes a record of time, place, and process.

The images remain unfixed. Oxidation continues during the exhibition: black spots emerge, and colors slowly shift. The work thus becomes a living process: the photograph does not merely depict nature, but becomes nature itself.

10. Stars

In the early 1890s, August Strindberg became fascinated by the idea that the universe might be shaped like an egg — a living shell pierced with openings through which starlight could pass. This vision came from Ein neues Weltall: Astro-Embryologie (1892) by K. G. Dobler, a curious hybrid of astronomy and embryology that deeply influenced him. Strindberg encountered this book through his close friend Edvard Munch during their time together in Berlin, where both artists were exploring experimental paths between art and science.

Strindberg and Munch shared a concern for vision and the unseen. Less widely known is that Munch worked closely with photography, using it as a tool for distortion, repetition, and psychological exploration. Strindberg, meanwhile, grew increasingly skeptical of lenses and cameras as claims to truth, leading him to develop Celestography.

While studying Strindberg’s manuscripts in the archives, I noticed tiny perforations in the paper. At first, I did not know what they were. Only when I held the page against the light did the pattern reveal itself: constellations traced with a needle, including Orion. In that moment, it felt as though the boundary of time dissolved — as if I were seeing what Strindberg had once seen, crossing more than a century through the smallest of marks.

In Stars, I continue this gesture.

The image is composed of one hundred astronomical illustrations and photographs published before 1894, superimposed into a single layered surface and printed on thin Japanese paper, reminiscent of Strindberg’s manuscript paper from Lessebo.

Using the exact date of his pierced page — 14 February 1894 — I reconstructed the sky he would have seen using astronomical software, and pierced the same constellations with a needle, extending the drawing he had begun.

From the front, the work appears as a dense nineteenth-century star map. From behind, light passes through the punctures, projecting constellations into space — a collaboration across time.

3rd Letter: Simulacrum

This chapter begins with a simple question: what might the sky have looked like when August Strindberg created his Celestographs?

In attempting to retrace the conditions of these experiments, I examined both his published writings and unpublished notes in order to determine the possible dates and moments during which they took place. Using astronomical software developed at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Japan, I reconstructed the positions and movements of the stars, the moon, and the sun above Dornach Castle between December 1893 and February 1894.

These reconstructions suggest what the sky might have looked like if it had been captured through a precise optical system. Yet even with exact calculations, reconstruction can never fully restore what was actually seen. Within this fragile space between precision and uncertainty, a question of authenticity emerges.

To produce these images, I photographed the computer screen directly using a 4 × 5 inch large-format camera. The image, initially generated as a digital positive, is translated into a silver gelatin negative. During this process, the material properties of the film and its development alter and diminish part of the recorded information. The negative is then digitized and printed as a positive on Fujitrans (Lambda print).

The images of the sky are presented in light boxes whose dimensions correspond to those of my computer screen. These reconstructions include stars that are no longer visible today because of light pollution.

Each stage — from virtual simulation to film, from negative to positive — introduces a distance. What appears in the light box is already no longer identical to what was visible on the screen. The closer the reconstruction attempts to approach reality, the further it moves from its origin.

4th Letter: Stardust

The original photographic plates of August Strindberg’s Celestographs have disappeared. Only fragments remain: digitized traces, notes, descriptions, and the writings of Frida Uhl. From these elements, I attempt to imagine what he may have seen on the original plates.

The Celestographs preserved in archives exist only through positive images, inaccessible because of their extreme fragility. Circulating online, they appear in multiple forms — resized, reframed, or contrast-adjusted — sometimes transformed to the point of resembling galaxies. The more one searches for the original image, the further it seems to recede. In the absence of direct access, the authenticity of these reproductions becomes unstable, oscillating between different interpretations.

What emerges from this research is a contrast between Strindberg’s precise descriptions — these dust-like imprints, compared to lunar surfaces or solar coronas — and Frida’s attempt to perceive what remains invisible, approached through belief.

It is within this uncertainty, and within this act of belief, that the work takes shape.

Each photogram is constructed from dust and chemical reactions, thereby extending the material logic of the Celestographs. Using the wet collodion process on glass — in which the developed image appears as a positive while projection restores it as a negative — these images are projected into the exhibition space. An LED light, activated by the movements of visitors through ultrasonic sensors, causes them to appear and disappear.

This unstable visibility echoes the condition of the Celestographs: never fully accessible, present only through imagination.

The image no longer belongs to its origin, but to the conditions through which it appears. What we see depends as much on belief as on the image itself.

5th Letter: Lumière

The original negatives no longer exist; only fragile positive prints remain, preserved in the darkness of the National Library of Sweden, rarely visible. This final chapter begins with an attempt to recreate that vanished material.

In 2023–24, I visited Dornach Castle in Austria, where August Strindberg produced his Celestographs. Using unopened Lumière silver bromide gelatin plates dating from the late nineteenth century — identical to those he used — I made new exposures on the same dates and at the same hours.

These new Celestographs do not reproduce the missing plates, but respond instead to present conditions, rewriting their original context: light, environment, and time. After more than 130 years, the plates themselves record traces of their own duration — mold, heat, alterations — becoming active elements in their production.

Some plates remain unfixed, as Strindberg described. Preserved in a sliding wooden box, they appear only in the presence of light, and to see them is already to begin making them disappear. Like the original prints in the archive, they persist by escaping the gaze. An image, made to be seen, is preserved by remaining unseen.

This chapter returns to the origins of photography, when light fixed the image while simultaneously erasing it. One day, these images too will completely disappear. What remains is not the image itself, but its possibility — preserved in memory, shaped by imagination.