In the Year of the Quiet Sun takes its name from the solar phenomenon that occurs every eleven years when the sun’s surface cools enough to allow observatories to study solar activity. From November 1964 to November 1965, the countries of the world, including many newly independent African states, issued stamps to commemorate the first scientific expedition to study the surface of the sun.
In the Year of the Quiet Sun, the astronomical time of the quiet sun converges with the political calendar of conferences that took place in cities such as Accra, Addis Ababa, Bandung, Berlin and Casablanca throughout the 1950s and 1960s when politicians, activists and journalists gathered to discuss and plan the continental programme of Pan Africanist policy.
It then proceeds through scenes that allude to the making and the unmaking of polity on a continental scale. Its post lens based aesthetic focuses upon details of postage stamps, generating a monumentality that heightens the indexicality and iconography of Pan-African Pop Art, Neo‐Elisabethan portraiture and Social Realist heraldry.
As a form of visual study, the film dramatises the forms of postal politics that emerge from the inadvertent iconoclasm visited upon the ceremony of independence by the anonymous actions of postal history.
In the Year of the Quiet Sun invites viewers to adopt the role of a visitor from a capitalist future visiting rooms displaying artefacts from a speculative kinomuseum of Pan-‐African Pop Art. 34.10 mins HD, Colour, Sound, Stereo
Co-‐commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, CASCO Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht, Bergen Kunsthall, Norway
