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The Sun Sets Eight Times a Day. This 10-day online festival brought artists from eight different time zones together for an artistic exchange. It took place from July 21st to July 31st, 2021. A virtual garden was built out of the collaborative contributions of the artists and their audiences. You may still visit the garden through the link provided for you in this article.
Abdalla Daif and Lydia Ziemke came up with the idea for the online festival The Sun Sets Eight Times a Day. Lydia Ziemke is a director from Berlin. Abdalla Daif lives in the Netherlands. He is an Egyptian performing artist and producer who has extensive experience working with diverse cultures in the Middle East and in Europe.
The online festival spanned eight time zones and brought together eight artists who live streamed from their location at sunset, showing themselves and their surroundings for a quarter of an hour.
Amitesh Grover started at 3:45 pm Central European Time in Delhi, India, and dug up several objects and fortune cookie slips from a flower box. The little notes described a paradisiacal garden, perhaps a garden that will soon bloom and thrive right where she stood.
Even the badly shaken Beirut, where half the port was blown up almost a year ago. The explosion devastated entire districts, over 200 people were killed.
But, from the car window of the director and actress Maya Zbib, co-founder of the Zoukak Theatre Company, we saw not the destruction, but beauty. The pastel-colored sky over the Corniche, the long coastal promenade of Beirut, perfect for long evening strolls.
A few minutes later, we were invited to watch the sunset over Alexandria, Egypt.
There, Abdalla Daif contrasted the picturesque sunset view of the city skyline with a gloomy scenario.
He explained, “In a few years this sunset might no longer exist, because Alexandria is acutely threatened by rising sea levels. All people must face this reality together. The reality of climate change. The crisis is everywhere.”
Over the course of the 10-day online festival, we experienced the sunsets only twice together with the artists in their hometowns across the world. On the 4th day and during the closing session on the 10th and last day.
The web platform, built by German media artist Daniel Hengst, had (And has. You can still access it here) two levels: You start with the virtual journey on the clearly structured homepage which is set in the clouds. From there, a link will let you enter the garden.
This garden hovers above the clouds as a square piece of earth cut out of the planet. Vibrant colored dots mark the areas in which the individual artists worked. If you click on any one of the dots, you end up in an artist’s garden. There, additional content is hidden behind individual objects that light up when you move the mouse over them.
Here a few examples:
Maya Zbib took three paintings by the Lebanese painter Huguette Caland as the starting point for videos in which she dealt with the relationship to her own body.
Azade Shahmiri posted soundless short films in her Kariz workshop for lost, abandoned, and forgotten things. In which she, for example, superimposed panes of glass and asked her colleagues to add a sound, which further abstracted the video still life.
Abdalla Daif’s Alienation Picnic provided depth and thoughtfulness. Video dialogues between two of the artists on topics such as climate change, mobility and spirituality were hidden under the blue and white checkered virtual picnic blanket.
Lucy Ellison collected three-minute manifestos from each of her colleagues in her Community Garden. A new turnip was planted for each of them.
Lydia Ziemke wanted to bring together perspectives on a year of upheaval and asked: “What significance did 1989 have for you?”
She summed up multiple perspectives of all “Eight Sunsets” for the event she focused on: the fall of the Berlin wall.
In a video window full of small televisions, one and the same newscaster announced the fall of the Berlin Wall in all eight cities involved. As the announcer spoke in each different city, it became clear that 1989 was not only a year of upheaval for Germany, but also a year of upheaval across the world, as the new Germany impacted in different ways in each separate place.
Amitesh Grover in Dehli spoke as a lonely flag fluttered. The Indian artist labeled it every day. Divulging, little by little, a parable about artistic freedom and the power and role of state symbols such as national flags.
The Sun Sets Eight Times A Day experimented on how an international artist exchange can work in a digital world.
The eight artists: Youness Atbane (Morocco), Zarif Bakirova (Azerbaijan), Amitesh Grover (India), Abdalla Daif (Egypt), Lucy Ellinson (Cymru / Wales, GB), Azade Shahmiri (Iran), Maya Zbib (Lebanon), and Lydia Ziemke (Germany) all work either interdisciplinary or in theatre.
If you still want to rummage through their gardens, the website is as of this moment (Aug 15th, 2021) still open and invites you to linger and explore.
Official Website of ‘The Sun Sets Eight Times a Day’
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Liam Klenk was born in Central Europe and has since lived on four continents. Liam has always been engaged in creative pursuits, ranging from photography and graphic design, to writing short stories and poetry, to working in theatre and shows. In 2016, Liam published his first book and memoir, 'Paralian'.
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