Magali Duzant

Golden Hours: Live Streaming Sunset is a video installation that aggregates real-time webcam footage of sunsets around the world. With the eventual goal to create a never-ending 24-hour cycle, Duzant has collaborated with webcam operators in 8 cities to assemble this 6 hour piece for Queens International 2016. Taking advantage of the immediacy of Internet communication, her program automatically switches time zones just as the sun disappears from the horizon. In this way, the event becomes one suspended moment, collapsing distance and time as it unfurls across places, cultures, and landscapes. While the work is poetic in its subject matter, the chosen locations of each sunset also point to today’s mass migration crisis, as cities such as Visby, Sweden or Lampedusa, Italy have become centers for migrants fleeing the Middle East and Africa. The ease in which the video switches between localities lies in direct contrast to the extreme difficulty many refugees have had in relocating their own physical bodies to safety. While Duzant’s sunset may appear as continuous and unfettered, by using the Internet as an expansive resource her pointed choice of locations highlights that the geopolitics of the world outside of the webcam lens are far from unified or fluid.

Approximate schedule of sunsets on view at Queens Museum (EST): Giza, Egypt: 11:00 -12:10; Visby, Sweden: 12:10 - 12:45; Lampedusa, Italy: 12:45 - 13:45; Roses, Catalonia, Spain: 14:45 - 14:15; Cadiz, Spain: 14:15 - 15:00; Las Palmas, Canary Islands: 15:00 - 15:30; Iceland: 15:30 - 16:30; Bahia, Brazil: 16:30 - 17:00