Sixteen sunrises on a bad day.

An astronaut orbits Earth in the International Space Station. Here, the sun rises 16 times and sets 16 times every 24 hours. Each day becomes a rigorous labour of witnessing 8 billion lives and lifetimes in 32 fractal glimpses. They are trying to make an argument for hope. Conference on Hope traverses a single unwieldy and metamorphic day. Empires rise and fall, women weave baskets and stories, the ocean reclaims the cliffs, the fabled Hoi Yi shoots nine suns from the sky while a mother labours alone in a bathtub. Promises of objectivity and clarity buckle as the narrator, increasingly unable to separate themselves from their own destruction, finds themselves devoured by their own story storytelling. In this digital age of live-streamed war crimes being enacted in Palestine, what does it mean to bear witness?

Image Credit: Apurva Gupta