Solstice
Solstice is a 24-minute dual high-definition video projection installation, drawing on perceptions of time, memory and the cyclical patterns of nature. It was commissioned in 2006 by Film and Video Umbrella and Harewood House Trust in association with Aspex Gallery and supported by Arts Council England. The soundtrack was composed by Miguel d’Oliveira and performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra.
In 2005, an astronomer helped Madahar photograph the night sky for an image in her earlier series Falling. Her experience of star gazing, recognising constellations and trying to comprehend the vast distances and time that light takes to travel through the universe was deeply profound. The notion of a day as a lived experience as well as a unit of time governed by celestial changes became the inspiration for Solstice.
Two significant phases in the year are the northern and southern solstices marking the sun reaching its highest or lowest point in the sky before turning south or north respectively. Each year in the northern hemisphere, when the solstice falls on 20th or 21st June, the greatest amount of daylight and the shortest night are experienced. In contrast, at the solstice occurring around 21st or 22nd December, we encounter the least hours of daylight and the longest stretch of darkness.
Solstice was shot in a rural landscape in Wiltshire, England. Chance and unrepeatable events have played a major factor in Madahar’s previous bodies of work and this was again evident in the production of Solstice. The unpredictability of weather patterns, especially fog, meant that filming was only feasible on the solstices in December 2006 and June 2007.
For each film, a digital SLR camera was fixed pointing to the sky and aligned so that the star Polaris (the North Star), appeared in the centre of the frame. Filming then took place for 24 hours from midnight to midnight. With the camera set on time-lapse mode to shoot 25 times a minute, this allowed each hour to be condensed to a minute of footage. Thus in total, the 24 hours of a solstice were captured in 36,000 stills and subsequently translated into a 24 minute film.
When studying the night sky, the Earth’s daily rotation creates the appearance of the stars circling around the North Star. This movement of the stars is traced as light trails within the night segments of the films by superimposing one digital still on top of another. The same effect can also be seen in a long exposure photograph of a clear star-lit night. The passage of time is no longer abstract, but optically manifest; what has occurred seconds, minutes and hours before is fixed in an image, to be experienced simultaneously.
In conjunction with the high visual resolution, the orchestral soundtrack is pivotal in creating a richly intense, almost ‘jewel-like’, experience. Miguel d’Oliveira created a score where in places, the impression of time is compressed and sometimes, a protracted experience, reinforced by the tempo, or manipulation, of various sections. Specific instruments, melodies, rhythms or textures were used to evoke the sensation of summer heat and daylight or the coldness of winter or night. The music was performed by a 22-piece ensemble from the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, along with several instruments played by d’Oliveira himself.