Planet of Another Impossibility

The project addresses an impossible encounter—not due to the absence of a meeting as a point where geographic, temporal, and fateful trajectories intersect, but because of the radical incommensurability of modes of existence. Such a “non-meeting” is described in Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris. The novel’s concept and its Russian edition—treated as a material object—served as the basis for creating the artwork Planet of Another Impossibility, which articulates the logic of incommensurability through the aesthetics of strict sequentiality of formal elements.
The novel depicts attempts at interaction between two entities: terrestrial and extraterrestrial. As an artistic assumption, one may imagine each possessing consciousness—but radically different kinds. When they enter into communication, terrestrial consciousness finds its very existence threatened. To grasp the nature of this threat and why the characters’ interaction is impossible, we must consider the consciousness of the protagonist and that of Solaris as structures governed by fundamentally divergent internal laws.
Thus, the novel presents two structures of consciousness: terrestrial (human) and extraterrestrial (Other). The artwork presents them to the viewer as mutually embedded within a single model of an “alien world” shaped as a planet—its surface covered with symbolic elements, with the artwork itself taking the form of a globe.
The terrestrial structure of consciousness is portrayed here as split into conscious and unconscious parts—this division constituting its defining feature within the project. This duality is expressed through elements folded from the novel’s pages using origami technique: squares with two diagonal folds pressed tightly against one another, leaving a small aperture between them. The unconscious is thus represented as a locus—through the novel’s text concealed within these folds—a site of experience inaccessible to the Other.
Within the aperture of each paper element lies another component: a small black circle made of glossy material that shimmers in the light, evoking dynamism and resembling a human pupil. Some of these pupils are positioned beneath the paper folds, precisely at the center of each aperture, creating the impression of a gaze—watchful yet concealed.
The folded paper elements are arranged across the globe’s surface in strict sequence, proportionally decreasing in size toward the planet’s poles, establishing a rhythm of rigorous order. As a result, the seams between the paper elements visually evoke a geodetic grid.
All these visual elements—folds, apertures, pupils, and lines—convey the impression of a structure ordered as a rigorous system, expressed through the object’s precise geometry and symmetry.
The extraterrestrial structure of consciousness is indicated through a single perceivable quality: it contains something that might provisionally be called a gaze from which there is no escape. Solaris seems to see what its visitors conceal and can reveal it back to them. In the artwork, this kind of gaze is represented by the pupils positioned at the junctures between paper elements.
This inescapable gaze is linked to the theme of madness that permeates the novel—a consequence of contact with an alien Other that accesses the hidden dimensions of human being. In this context, the planet’s geodetic grid, dotted with pupils, visualizes the absolute transparency of human consciousness to an alien entity. From this perspective, the grid functions as terrestrial consciousness, now determined by Solaris’s field. What was previously hidden—governed by an internal law—has now been rewired from the outside by the logic of the Other. Within Solaris’s logic, everything hidden becomes manifest. Hence, the grid on the globe is exposed—it lies on the surface. The hidden dimension of terrestrial consciousness, represented by text and pupils nestled within paper folds, appears as if viewed from within by Solaris and projected outward—yet retaining the form of concealment. This is visually rendered through pupils placed precisely on the grid lines. Such an inversion of the intimate becomes, in this context, a side effect of the collision between two entities, appearing to the human as pure madness.
In attempting to comprehend this, the planet’s visitors resort to the only logic available to them—human logic—and fail. Human consciousness finds itself trapped within its own limitations. Here, the grid acquires another meaning: it is interpreted not as the unconscious rewired and externalized by Solaris, but as the visual form of a trap.
No knowledge of Solaris is possible; it remains absolutely opaque to understanding—it embodies absolute alterity. The human, by contrast, becomes the embodiment of absolute transparency before radical foreignness.
Within the logic of this project, human subjectivity is conceived as a structure impossible without a hidden dimension; for Solaris, however, access to the Other’s hidden realm is an intrinsic feature of its consciousness—rendering the hidden visible simply through the Other’s presence. It is precisely in this collision of radically divergent structures—not with a hostile or benevolent force, but with a logic in which interiority is impossible—that the “impossible encounter” resides.