Let’s Get Sun-kissed

Let’s Get Sun-kissed

Filips Smits

Let’s Get Sun-kissed

Nominated by ISSP, 2026

Let’s Get Sun-Kissed is an analogue photography project composed of staged interventions in urban environments across the Baltic states. Set in post-Soviet housing blocks, peripheral courtyards, rooftops, and improvised “recreation zones,” the series explores how everyday acts of stillness— resting, sunbathing, pausing—can quietly challenge the logic of spaces designed for movement, control, and visibility. The project investigates the politics of public presence. A body at rest in the wrong place becomes a subtle disruption, prompting questions about who can occupy space without purpose, who is visible, and how urban environments shape behavioural norms. The sun functions as both a biological need and a cultural ritual—desired, unevenly accessible, and quietly claimed. Drawing on Situationist psychogeography and the dérive, the work constructs semi-fictional scenes in collaboration with stylists, set designers, actors, and location specialists. Each image hovers between documentation and performance, where the visual language of fashion, theatre, and conceptual photography intersect. Through surreal gestures and soft displacements, the project reframes the everyday city as a space of potential—where pleasure, intimacy, and presence can momentarily interrupt the pace of urban life. It invites viewers to reconsider public space not as purely functional, but as a contested and emotionally charged landscape. As an evolving body of work, Let’s Get Sun-Kissed continues to uncover new sites where sunlight, selfhood, and collective leisure converge— temporary sanctuaries that imagine alternate ways of being together in the city.