1, Each day is a whole year. ( (( ((( () ))) )) ) Lato A, 27’14”, HD video, colour, stereo sound; Each day is a whole year. ( (( ((( () ))) )) ) Lato B, 28’30”, HD video, colour, stereo sound, 2022 [extract]
The International Space Station (ISS) travels at an altitude of 402 km above Earth. It circles the globe every 93 minutes at a speed of about 27,500 km/h. This means that the ISS sees about sixteen sunrises and sunsets every twenty-four man-hours. On board, this clarification is used to indicate that the convention does not refer to the reality of the sixteen sunrises that astronauts actually experience, but rather is the mental coupling of a time as understood elsewhere. This displaced counting, viewing time as understood elsewhere, is the primary and fundamental convention on which we also shape all understanding of the video content.
Surfing fascicles of light, video projections potentially travel forward into eternity, projecting themselves as time lightyears before even as time-imagery. And when their content crashes against a surface, this ends up taking on formations shaped by both source and surface, linked as they are by the Luciferian bond. In this sense, my shadow is the direct outcome of the impact (in direction, time and space) of the sun’s nuclear fusion on my body: an anti-video.
Silvia Hell’s videos may thus be said to be anti-videos of each other, projected for mutual frontal benefit, as if they were watching each other. The rest of us view from the side, and no other frontal positions may be adopted without obscuring them. Each day is a whole year is the transverse position of time, the oblique stance compared to the projectors, the head constantly oscillating between the chrono-nominal and the chrono-logical like a pendulum.
If each day is a whole year, events are grouped and condensed, narrated in density and under pressure, sometimes one at the expense of the other, or each to the sound of the other. It is the events we occupy and encounter that become the means by which we understand our place in the world.
It is one crowded with volcanoes, birds and walls, Naples and Miami, pseudoscientists in the rain, an attempt to rap Heraclitus, the fifteen or so languages that inhabited Etel Adnan, the Earthrise, storms of a few pixels, skewed orthogonality, clouds mixed with habits, and chameleons guarding the origin of the carmine red in their throats.
“Each day is a whole year [...].
On this night, every night. All the oceans in this brain.” 1
There is room for everything and everything recognises its place. There is no need to fret.
Bianca Schröder
1 Etel Adnan, archive of the exhibition Etel Adnan & Simone Fattal. Working Together, Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare, Bolzano, 2022.
