The arctic summer sun is hibernating in the ICEHOTEL, north of the polar circle in Swedish Lapland. It is in this icy nest that it found shelter during dark winter months. The anteroom is welcoming the visitor illustrating winter’s darkness in ephemeral colours of polar twilight. By passing a threshold, guests will enter the temple of the midnight sun, where warm light hues fill the bedroom’s dome. Within its pure materiality of light and snow Kaamos Aurinko is juxtaposing the two extreme seasons of the north. The visitor can experience at once the polar winter night and the summer’s warm midnight sun creating an ephemeral interplay of colours embedded into a seamless space of ice and snow.
While the anteroom’s twilight stays unchanged, the bedroom’s atmosphere is shifting within a series of finetuned colour-loops. Being seated on the bed gazing through the elliptic entrance, the visitor can observe when limits of space start floating between inside and outside directed by interchanging colours spreading diffuse within the dome.
The nature of the arctic is shaped by its extreme duality of the complete absence and presence of light. The polar night falls upon Jukkasjärvi on December 11, 2018 and this lasts until the 2nd of January 2019. In this time the sun will not surpass the horizon in this latitude, meaning it is almost always dark. Only more than a month later does daytime extend up to four hours, eventually to exceed more than eight hours at the end of Februrary.
The colours of the polar twilight in the winter months range between shades of dark violet to dark blue, which is sometimes illuminated by the fluorescent green of the majestic Aurora Borealis.
Complementary, the colours of the polar days commonly referred to as the midnight sun with its warm shades of the sunset that progress uninterruptedly into sunrise, are completely absent in the winter months.
