The Day The Sun Stands Still
Analog video / 4:3 / 03:51 / 2021
The Day The Sun Stands Still is a poetic reflection on the cyclicality of life, a continuation of my research on relations of personal and collective mythology.
This piece unveils the performative ritual that replays ancient practice of honouring nature, and welcoming the dark time of the year.
It was filmed on winter solstice, “the special day when the Sun stands still”, which means symbolic death and rebirth of the Sun according to ancient mythology. Place, where it happens, is called Kamyana Mohyla (The Stone Tomb), and belongs to the oldest historical and cultural sites on the Earth. Over the thousands of years people were making their rituals and sacred ceremonies in this place, and so did I.
During 2021, I experienced a row of different meetings with death. First, my father, whose stubbornness and passion for film photography I inherited, died. Afterward, my grandmother, who raised me and whose patience I absorbed from my childhood, died in my arms. In the end, my personal relationship in which I found my true self once, became a trap for me and died. My vision of life, myself, and the future turned out to be ruined. I needed a personal therapeutic ritual to make myself deeply sleepover from everything that happened. Some fairytales say that «The morning is wiser than the evening», which means that certain work should be done internally. Thus I went out to put myself to sleep.
This piece unveils the need for instinctual hibernation and replays the ancient practice of honouring the dark time of the year. It is about inner transformation through personal identification with nature which sleeps in the wintertime and thus regenerates itself.
Currently, this ancient location is occupied and mined by russians.