In 1951, Juan Perón told the world that Argentina had achieved controlled nuclear fusion, describing the feat as lighting artificial suns on the Earth. The claim rested on work carried out on Huemul Island, in Patagonia, by the Austrian-born scientist Ronald Richter. When independent observers were refused access to the site, the deception behind Project Huemul dissolved. Pablo Cabado first travelled to the island with that history in mind. The photographs gathered in Little Suns on Earth, made over six years of repeated visits, record what remains: overgrown tracks, ruined buildings, walls marked with swastikas, and scattered bullets and electrical components. The place is empty, yet the pictures never feel merely documentary. Shot in tritone, they slow the eye and hold an atmosphere in which the island’s past and its present silence are difficult to separate.
Cabado’s sequence is not a conventional investigative record. It accumulates evidence by degrees, allowing abandoned infrastructure to read as both historical residue and contemporary landscape. The book pairs this visual narrative with an illustrated essay by historian Diego Castelfranco, who reconstructs the political and scientific story of the project, from Argentina’s wartime neutrality and its postwar absorption of German specialists to the publicity that briefly made Huemul a global curiosity. Castelfranco’s contribution gives the images a factual frame without turning the book into a history lecture; the photographs retain their own authority.
Eriskay Connection issued the volume in 2023 as a double Swiss-bound softcover designed by Carel Fransen, with translations by Jorge Salvetti and lithography and printing by MAS Matbaa. The binding allows spreads to open fully, which suits photographs that depend on unhurried looking rather than dramatic incident.
For collectors drawn to photobooks where a specific historical episode is examined through place, the book offers a considered example. Its interest lies in the way documentary material, archival history, and book design are made to work together, not in any claim about the market. Little Suns on Earth asks the reader to stand on the island and measure the distance between a promised future and what was left behind.
