The Atacama Desert, in Chile, is the most arid place on Earth; its atmospheric conditions make it the perfect site for astronomical observations. Over time this immense territory has hosted many different human populations, including the ancient Chinchorro culture, the Inca empire, Spanish colonizers, and Indigenous Atacameño communities who continue to steward this territory. Nowadays, some of the world’s largest telescope arrays are installed there.

For Solaris, artist Oscar Santillán gathered sand from the Atacama Desert, which was melted into glass and turned into photographic lenses. These “desert eyes” were brought back to the Atacama desert and used to photograph its landscape. The captured images go beyond representing the landscape; in Solaris, the desert is an observing subject rather than a passive object to be looked at.

Taking inspiration from the sci-fi classic by Polish writer Stanisław Lem (which imagined a more-than-human intelligence generated by the sea of a distant planet called Solaris) the series of images renders more-than-human vision and cognition material. As the sand was not purified when it was melted into glass and formed into lenses, lens flare and other distortions appear in these images—ecological traces of the landscape endure as the desert looks at itself.