La Rinascente. Little Sun

December 4th marks the opening of a special installation created by Little Sun for la Rinascente’s famous Milan store windows that will showcase the off-grid shops throughout the Christmas season. The design of these windows will establish a powerful visual link between customers in Milan and customers in these off-grid areas. 20% of the world’s population has no access to electricity or to clean, reliable, affordable light – that’s 1.6 billion people. Artist Olafur Eliasson and engineer Frederik Ottesen developed the Little Sun solar-powered lamp to change that.

Little Sun at la Rinascente, Milan. Photography © Marco Beck Peccoz, 2012. Courtesy of Little Sun.

This holiday season Little Sun joins the Italian department store la Rinascente in a celebration of light for all – making Little Sun lamps available in 6 off-grid shops for the first time. Little Sun shops have just opened in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Nairobi, Kenya; Jakarta, Indonesia; El Nido, Philippines; Yangon, Myanmar; and Johannesburg, South Africa.

Little Sun has created a special installation for la Rinascente’s Milan store windows that will showcase the 6 off-grid shops with regular photographic updates and stories throughout December.

Little Sun lamps are available for purchase in Italy at la Rinascente’s stores – buying a Little Sun at regular price in Italy allows Little Suns to be sold in these 6 off-grid shops at prices that are locally affordable.

Olafur Eliasson believes that “light is social”. He explains that he became aware of the power of light as a place of gathering and reunion of people since he was a child, when he was growing up in Iceland (where half of each year is spent in the dark). To him, access to electric light is more than a necessity: it is a right. That is why he has created this object that is altogether functional, demanding and of course, artistic.

"At this time of year, this project is a powerful reminder that we share the same fundamental needs all over the world – happiness, love, and light in our lives."

– Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson on Little Sun, 2012. Video: Tomas Gislason

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Olafur ELIASSON

Olafur Eliasson (Copenhagen, 1967) studied at the Royal Academy of the Arts in Copenhagen between 1989 and 1995. He represented Denmark in the 2003 Venice Biennale and has exhibited his work at numerous international museums. His work is part of private and public collections such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum in New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles and Tate Modern in London, where his seminal work The weather project was exhibited. Eliasson lives and works in Berlin and Copenhagen.

Eliasson represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and later that year installed The weather project at Tate Modern, London. Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, a survey exhibition organised by SFMOMA in 2007, travelled until 2010 to various venues, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

As professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin, Eliasson founded the Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute of Space Experiments) in 2009, an innovative model of arts education. In 2012, he launched Little Sun, a solar-powered lamp developed together with the engineer Frederik Ottesen to improve the lives of the approximately 1.6 billion people worldwide without access to electricity. Harpa Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre, for which he created the façade in collaboration with Henning Larsen Architects, was awarded the Mies van der Rohe Award 2013.

Verklighetsmaskiner (Reality machines) at t he Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2015, became the museum’s most visited show by a living artist. In 2016 Eliasson created a series of interventions for the palace and gardens of Versailles, including an enormous artificial waterfall that cascaded into the Grand Canal.

His other projects include Studio Other Spaces, an international office for art and architecture which he founded in Berlin in 2014 with architect Sebastian Behmann; and Little Sun, a social business and global project providing clean, affordable light and encouraging sustainable development, with engineer Frederik Ottesen.