Staring at the Sun
An experimental short film by Julia Flux

“Salt is solar matter crystallized—an archive of sunlight embedded in the Earth’s crust.”

Filmed entirely on an iPhone 7 in the salt flats and desert regions of the Desiertos de Murcia, Starring at the Sun is an experimental short film that forms part of Julia Flux’s long-standing research into desert ecologies and the material, spiritual, and geopolitical layers of desertification. It is a choreographic film-essay that entangles the human body with the substances and rhythms of sun and salt—both ancient forces that shape life through absence, irradiation, and mineral time.

Emerging as a side-study in search of embodied shapes of the sun, the film became a ritualistic inquiry into light and its residue—salt—as matter, spirit, and memory. Performed gestures in the film touch the brine, trace evaporated pools, and inhabit crystallizing grounds, translating planetary processes into choreographic movements. These actions echo Flux’s eco-somatic practice, in which the body listens, translates, and carries what is usually unseen or intangible.

The work gains uncanny immediacy in the context of Solar Cycle 25, which as of April 2025 is reaching its magnetic peak—its solar maximum—an apex of solar activity marked by intensified sunspots, flares, and coronal mass ejections. Over the last days of april 2025, Spain’s power and communication systems have experienced unusual disruptions, with causes still under investigation—though many suspect geomagnetic interference. What began as speculative, ritual cinema—what-if—now reveals itself as a kind of prophetic document.
The speculation became truth.

“What is god as this omnipresence? The untouchable. This web of photons around, within, allover. Be touched by in every second without ever having the chance to touch this/it yourself.”

Salt becomes here a carrier of this tension: the embodied archive of solar presence and the crystallized absence of water—a sacred paradox. The film enters into the mystery of how salt, which emerges through the complete extraction of liquid, becomes essential to navigating fluidity itself—both planetary and intracellular. It proposes that salt is the child of the entanglement between the sun and the Earth, the mineral that knows how to hold absence, the body that knows how to pulse with memory.

“Absence is a form.”

Influenced by Octavia E. Butler’s poem “We are Earthseed”, the film carries the tone of speculative becoming, of surrender to transformation as the only constant.
"All that you touch,
You Change.
All that you Change,
Changes you.
The only lasting truth is Change.
God is Change."

Starring at the Sun is a proposition. A return—not nostalgic, but elemental—to the beginning: the sun, the origin of all motion and matter. This return unfolds through salt’s crystallization, the stillness of salinas, and gestures shaped by solar rhythm.

It is not a documentary.
It is not fiction.
It is a mineral choreography.
A solar reality.

Not about looking at the sun,
but starring at it—
as if the body were lens, altar, and trace.