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Alberto Favaro
 

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Text published on Next Magazine

by Alberto Favaro

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Is there a more obvious cliché than a sunset photo?
What question is more childlike than "where does the sun go"?

Driven by the belief that undermining what we usually take for granted often reveals unexpected implications, seven years ago, after studying maps and times of sunrises and sunsets, I discovered that only twice a year at the exact moment in which on the Maltese coast we perceive the sunset, on a different beach of another archipelago, in Hawaii, you’ll find someone who is watching the exact same sun rising.

This ideal relay passage brings together, through two similar but opposite events, places 12,000 km apart, at the end and at the beginning of a new day. The event is rarer than you might think given that for the rest of the year the Maltese sunset is otherwise synchronized with a sunrise in the open ocean.

In March 2017, with the help of kind collaborators who responded to my call from Hawaii, I filmed the event from Malta, immortalising this sunset/sunrise synchrony.
 

Coincidentally, as though some ancestral questions do still hang over us unanswered,
the location I chose to create this artwork is located a short distance from Ħaġar Qim temples, thousands of years old structures oriented towards the cosmos and destined to mark the seasons through the sun like meridians.

“..The sunset is a special homage that the sun pays to me personally,” as Calvino puts it in his book Palomar.
He was alluding to the fact that, wherever you move, the reflection of the setting sun on the sea always points only to you, forming a sword of light of which you alone are the summit.
In fact, both the sunset and sunrise are phenomena that exist only in relation to an observer. Without a localised point of view in the right place and time, all you’d get are rotating celestial bodies, but no sunset as we understand it.

Through my artwork, I tried to give tactility to this relationship between individual perception and all-encompassing reality, between the privilege of our uniqueness, as recalled by Calvino, and the condemnation of our incompleteness as finite beings in time and space.

Could a polyphonic vision, then, be a more adequate framework to understand reality?

A vision that incorporates heterogeneous and partial perspectives, not as the sum of elements in isolation but rather in the form of relationships. On the other hand, there is no exact time when the sun sets and when it rises but it does so constantly and simultaneously, on the condition that there is someone observing it.

This question is not just limited to the observation of astronomical events, but to how we perceive and respond to the world in general.
There seems to be a proportionality between the magnitude of our problems and the narrowness from which we observe them. Embracing a broader space-time perspective, which goes beyond the limitations of the individual and the single point of view, inevitably imposes a redefinition and prioritization of our problems but above all, it poses new questions of meaning.

Would notions such as borders or war take on a different meaning, if not become entirely meaningless, through a cosmic perspective?

Would the environmental emergency take on a different meaning if examined in a space-time period that goes beyond the narrowness of our daily lives?

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