2022
1h 8min 26sec
Director and Artist: Asako Shiroki
Director of Photography and Sound: Asako Shiroki
Video and Sound Editor: Yoshihiro Inada

This work was filmed on the occasion of the residency program at Malt AIR at Maltfabrikken in Ebeltoft in Denmark
where is a collaboration between Maltfabrikken, Kunsthal Aarhus and The Danish Art Workshops, and the programme
is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.

This drawing captures the sun at its highest and longest appearance of the year on the summer solstice, a significant day for people in Scandinavia where winters are long and dark. I was staying in a room in Ebeltoft, Denmark, surrounded by sea and plains, where a square window opened in the ceiling. For exactly one hour, the sun passed directly over that window signifying its highest point in the sky. When the sunlight reached the flowers arranged on the table, their shadows appeared, and instinctively I began tracing the contours of those shadows with a pencil. As I continued to follow the shifting lines, the intensity of light reflecting on the paper became blinding, making it impossible for me to see the lines I was drawing. All I could do was pursue the edge of the shadow with the pencil tip. Only when clouds obscured the sun did the drawn lines begin to emerge clearly, allowing me to confront the time that had just passed. Even as I remain in the here and now, the present moment before me repeatedly appears and vanishes.
The unit of one hour, across cultures and beliefs, has been considered a sacred measure through which one may connect with the divine. On this day of midsummer a moment to receive and rejoice in nature’ s abundance I traced the arc of the sun at its peak, within the constraint of a single hour, converting light into lines and revealing something otherwise invisible.