TotalEclipse

Ole Ukena is a Berlin-trained contemporary artist with a 20-year practice, working between Bali, Berlin and Brazil. He trained at the Universität der Künste Berlin under Lothar Baumgarten, Daniel Richter and Hito Steyerl. His work has shown at Centre Pompidou, Paris and Paris Photo, Grand Palais; he holds a permanent spatial commission (Space Bloom, Genezarethkirche Berlin) and exhibited at Zona Maco, Mexico City in 2026. Nightmares on Wax wore his work on an album cover; the critic Jerry Saltz has shared it. In 2021 he built FLOWSTATE at Funkhaus Berlin — with Tiago.

Crucially for Nômade: Ole isn't an artist bolting art onto a hotel. He founded and runs AIR — an artist residency in Ubud, Bali — a house that already merges art, architecture, interior design and hospitality into one experience. He works inside this industry. He also founded UKENA (wearable art) and co-founded the music label IAMYOU with Deer Jade. Three ventures, one hand.

We take over Nômade for the week around it and turn the whole house into one immersive work that builds to that moment. Twelve art forms, every sense, seven days. The eclipse is the still point everything moves toward.

The window is August 8–15, 2026, with the eclipse on August 12.

I've already spoken to Deer Jade. She's in, and the IAMYOU label night could land on August 9, her birthday, which would make that night its own moment.

A lot of my closest people are waiting on a confirmed date to plan their summer, and Ibiza books out fast in August. The ask: can we lock the week, even loosely, as soon as it feels right to you? The moment we do, I can tell people to hold the dates.

A total solar eclipse at sunset over Ibiza. The island in the moon's shadow, the sea going silver then black, the corona open in the sky. It's the rarest thing most people will ever stand under, and it lasts only a moment.

I don't want an event on eclipse night. I want the whole week built around it, the house as one continuous work you live inside. And the layer underneath it is what we've been calling first contact: not something arriving from outside, but disciplines that have never shared a room — textile, sound, architecture, food, ritual, film, AI — finally in one. The eclipse is just the sky agreeing.

Why Nômade specifically: the words on the Nômade site already say it. One of the guiding principles is "constant movement," and the site puts it like this: "A nomad is someone who embarks on a journey, both outer and inner."

That's the eclipse. Constant movement, and then for one moment everything stops, the corona appears, and you remember why you move. Humans have gathered to mark solar turning points for as long as there's been sky — from solstices to Stonehenge to midsummer fires; an eclipse is the most powerful version of that ancient impulse. So I'm not trying to bolt an art thing onto the hotel. I want to build the fullest version of what Nômade already is.

And the timing makes it even more charged: Nômade Temple Ibiza opens in July 2026, designed by Bjarke Ingels — buildings terraformed to appear discovered, not constructed, in piedra blanca and sabina wood, sited on the northern coast. TOTAL ECLIPSE would happen in August, just weeks after the house opens its doors for the first time. It's the right kind of first.

I've been circling a few names and frames. Here they are as options, not decisions; tell me which one lands for you.

• TOTAL ECLIPSE — what I'm leading with. It has the astronomical precision: totality, the moment of complete cover.
• FULL ECLIPSE — a softer, more absolute variant of the same.
• FIRST CONTACT — the conceptual layer underneath: the moment disciplines that usually perform separately start merging. It also rhymes with my music label, I AM YOU, which is about dissolving the line between self and other.
• DIS·CLOSURE — the one I love conceptually. An eclipse is the ultimate disclosure: the sun's corona, hidden every other moment of our lives, becomes visible only during totality, and stars appear in daylight. Things that are always there, revealed only when the obvious goes dark. That's exactly how the work behaves — the retroreflective pieces stay invisible until light hits them. The clothes, the art and the whole week grow from this one idea. (The capsule plays on it too: DISCLOTHURE.)

Most likely we land on TOTAL ECLIPSE with one of these as the layer underneath. Curious which pulls you.

• 360° / all senses. Not a show you look at, a world you're inside: sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, and the felt senses of movement, balance and time.
• Twelve art forms, one environment. Art, textile, music, architecture, food, scent, ritual, film, AI, dance, voice, light.
• The connective thread. Cloth, light and the body run through every room, so there's no moment you step out of the work.
• The arc. The week builds, day by day, to totality on the 12th, then resolves.
• First contact. The meeting of worlds.

Five, six or seven days is open — my instinct is the full week so it can breathe. Scale-wise I'm imagining something intimate, roughly 40 guests rather than a festival, but you tell me what the house actually holds. Daily texture: mornings for wellness, breathwork, listening and slow art; afternoons for workshops, daytime music and talks; nights for music, dinners, the label night and the party.

No numbers yet — just the menu. Which pieces go where depends entirely on seeing the spaces, so photos of the Ibiza house are really the key thing for me.

• Retroreflective linen wall works — the core. They stay hidden until light hits them, then they reveal what was always there. It's the eclipse, built into the material.
• Jackets and wearables — tied to the wall editions, so a guest can buy the work and wear it.
• Linen sets — which could become a named collection for the week.
• A fabric cover for the DJ booth — lines that glow under light and tie the booth into the world.
• Tablecloths made on-site in the DISCLOTHURE workshop.
• A site-specific mural — made live during the residency.
• Affordable editions for the rooms — priced so a guest can actually take one home; they keep living in the house long after the week ends.
• Singular original works — the bigger one-off pieces, placed for specific spots in the house. Which pieces and where depends entirely on the spaces, so seeing the rooms is what lets me plan this properly.

In October 2021 we built FLOWSTATE at Funkhaus Berlin — MOB × Berlin × AMFE. A raw industrial hall turned into a walk-through world of my line works, with the retroreflective pieces hidden in plain sight until a light found them. This is the same instinct as the eclipse: things that are always there, revealed only when the light is right. It already worked once, with you in the room. Ibiza is the next, bigger version.

Funkhaus Berlin · October 2021 · with Tiago Oudman. Shown here as a feeling of what's possible, not a fixed checklist.

The music isn't a booking on top of the week — it's my own label. IAMYOU is the project about dissolving the line between self and other, the same idea as first contact, carried in sound. It already runs as a travelling series: Amsterdam, Tulum, NYC, Marrakech, Cappadocia, Bonjuk Bay, Medicine Festival. For the week, the label night becomes part of the work — Deer Jade's birthday as the first big night, with label artists shaping the arc toward the eclipse.

Bjarke Ingels designs the building. The interior designers select what goes in it. Every object, surface and wall arrives as the final word of someone who came before. And then I walk in.

YES AND is a short film — maybe ten minutes — where I move through Nômade Temple and add one more layer from my visual vocabulary to what already exists. A door gets a mark. A wall gets a brushstroke. A corner gets something that shifts the feeling of the whole room. Not painting over what's there, but completing a conversation that the architect started and the interior designer continued. I'm the last brush.

The title comes from improv theater: you never block what someone gives you. You say yes to the world as it exists — and then you add. That's also exactly the philosophy of the nomad. You arrive somewhere as it is, you don't try to replace it, you accept it and contribute. The eclipse version of that: the corona is always there, always behind the sun. You just have to wait for the right moment for it to show.

This one also works as a Procreate process film — each intervention pre-visualised on the actual space photos before it's painted, then filmed live. We need good interior photos from Nômade for that. Joshua Ballinger is the natural director; Benjamin Henretig as a second eye.

Everything below is a specific, committed deliverable — not a wishlist. These are the works that exist after the week ends, the permanent ones that keep giving.

Some of these you'll already know — the music world overlaps with yours. Others you might not: a curated layer of creatives, people building in AI, and collectors and investors active in hospitality — names that bring capital, reach and ideas from well beyond the art world. Read this as my open network, not a costed lineup; most are old or good friends. Budget shapes who actually comes — I'm showing you the full range so you can see the kind of room I can fill at Nômade. We curate down together.

• Documented properly — photographed and filmed, with a real short film of the week. Last time I did a big show there was no one set up to document or sell, and I'm not repeating that.
• Press built ahead of time, not chased after.
• The editions stay in place. They live in the rooms permanently and keep selling long after the guests leave, which turns them into a recurring income stream for the house, and for me too. How we split that is exactly the kind of thing worth going into properly when we talk. The same model could travel to the other houses: Ibiza, then Madrid, then Tulum.
• A week that happens once and then keeps giving, for both of us.

• Co-directed. Your read on what the house can hold matters as much as my vision.
• Room for the week. You've generously offered me the room to build in the space. That means a lot, it would make the work so much better, and it's where the live mural happens.
• Your homework 🙂 — photos of the Ibiza house, the walls, rooms, corners, anywhere art could live or anywhere that needs help (Madrid too if it's easy). This is genuinely the key thing for me, because knowing which spaces are open and where work can hang is what lets me plan exactly what goes where: the editions in the rooms, the singular pieces for specific spots, the murals where a wall needs identity. The spaces drive the whole plan.
• You've got the final call on space, volume and the real constraints of the house. I shape the work to fit, not the other way around.
• Keep it collaborative and honest the whole way, including the practical side when the time's right, so it works properly for both of us.

No numbers yet — just options to explore when the time is right.

• The editions and continuous-work idea across the Nômade houses (Ibiza, Madrid, Tulum).
• A capsule — UKENA × Nômade — in the boutique.
• The film and podcast as their own piece of content.
• The full visual identity and social media for the week. My studio can design the look and run the social content, so the week has one coherent visual world and a real presence online, not an afterthought tacked on at the end.
• Guest artists in residency. We invite a few high-profile guests to actually make work during their stay. They create at Nômade, that becomes content on its own, and it pulls their networks in with them. Done right, this is what brings the moneyed, art-world crowd that's a perfect fit for the house.
• A healthy recovery-drink partner for the nights — R Plus; Morta has the relationship.
• Bringing the right crowd: collectors, the AI and art world, the people who make these rooms electric.

The raw brainstorm behind this document — everything we talked through, unfiltered — is in the transcript linked below. It gives a sense of how the ideas move and where the energy is.

→ Read the call transcript

This is first contact. Pull it apart, tell me what excites you, what feels off, what the house can't hold, and what to cut. Then let's get on a call this week and start shaping it for real.

— Ole