At the turn of the year 2019/2020, I saw several posts on social media of spectacular sunsets. The images were accompanied by texts describing the colorful skies as a sign that the coming year would be successful. At the same time, my news feed was full of images of red skies from a burning Australia. In both cases, they were the result of emissions and human impact, but the different phenomena were interpreted very differently.

In his book A Paradise Built in Hell Rebecca Solnit describes how a 2003 power outage, for the first time in decades, revealed the starry sky over New York. Previously, it had been hidden by the city's electric lights. What authorities first feared would be a disaster instead became a situation of cooperation and neighborliness. Street parties where residents shared what they had became a common occurrence under the starry August sky. Following this, Solnit chooses to explain the origin of the English word disaster, and how it is a concatenation of Latin words dis and astra, which respectively mean outside and star; literally without star.

Sometimes crises become opportunities that force us to look at the structures and behaviors that caused them. These states of confusion or shock can force us to admit that the perception we have about our relationship to the outside world is wrong. That we are lost. Normally, this is not something we seek and often I think instead we seem to try to find ways to distract ourselves, or to align deviant experiences into narratives that are elastic enough to allow them. All to avoid admitting that something is wrong. When a crisis finally cuts through the noise of information and entertainment, we find ourselves in a situation where we need to orient ourselves. Find cardinal points and guiding stars that can be used to chart a new direction.

Aldo Zetterman (born in Stockholm 1982) received his master's degree from the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 2019, after previous studies at Valand Academy of Fine Arts and Gerrit Rietveld Academy. He is currently a fellow at the Bernadotte Program at the Academy of Fine Arts, of which the exhibition Dis ✶ Astro is a part.