FROM BACK HOME
After three weeks on the road, I arrived back home on the weekend. Maui has been fantastic – I met wonderful people and got to know a diversity of nature and environments completely unknown to me. That is one of the really interesting things about this project – it allows me to dive deep into a place, often far beyond what I imagined it to be. And it opens my eyes for people, places and connections between things that I may not have noticed otherwise – and that certainly has to do with the astronomy-context, as the sheer dimension of that science do not only make me think of the “bigger picture”, but seems to let me cherish the smallest and most ordinary of things, too. That said, Maui (like most places in this oh so wonderfully strange world) is so much more than white sand beaches, turquoise water and lush rainforest (although, it is definitely that, too…). There is an incredibly rich culture and history to the Hawaiian Islands, which I wasn’t fully aware of when I first got there. But, again, that is part of the beauty of this project and photography in general. Always surprised by the unpredictable. I hope you enjoyed the images and impressions from Hawaii – as always, there will be an in-depth photo-series published on the website soon and I’ll be in touch via newsletter once that is online. Let me close by giving you an outlook of what is to come in the next few months. In late June, an exhibition will be opening at Summerhall Arts Centre, Edinburgh, in cooperation with St. Andrews University; in August, there will be a show in the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Singen, Germany. I’ll keep you posted!

C.A.L.
Charles Augustus Lindbergh, a US Air Mail-pilot, emerged to instantaneous world fame at the age of 25 as a result of his solo, non-stop flight from New York to Paris in 1927 in a single-seat, single-engine, custom-made monoplane, the „Spirit of St. Louis“. In his later years, Lindbergh became an award-winning author, an explorer and environmentalist – campaigning to protect endangered species like humpback and blue whales. Lindbergh’s writings emphasized both his love for technology and nature; as well as his belief that „all the achievements of mankind have value only to the extent that they preserve and improve the quality of life“. He spent the last years of his life here in the tiny village of Kipahulu, where he had found the seclusion he had been searching. On the graveyard behind the Palapala Ho’omau Church, next to East Maui’s rough, volcanic coastline, a simple stone reads Psalms 139:9: „… If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea … C.A.L.“

POLYNESIAN ASTRONOMY II
Since the 1970s, there has been a rebirth of interest in Polynesian navigation and the astronomy that supports it – the movement set out to learn that particular ancient art and to studying the appearance of the skies over Polynesia. Moreover, they reconstructed the traditional Polynesian double-hulled voyaging canoe, the Hokule`a, and its ultimate non-instrumental navigation retracing the voyages of the ancients; due to the arrival of Cook in 1778 and subsequent arrivals of foreign ships, the Hawaiians were introduced to spyglasses, sextants, compasses, clocks, and charts, and adapted to that technology. The foreign ideas and techniques soon crowded out the ancient and extensive knowledge of the sky and most of this ancient lore has been lost and forgotten.