The Dislocation of Degree Zero

Overview

In The Dislocation of Degree Zero, Raqs Media Collective transforms found aerial footage of desert landscapes in the United Arab Emirates into a moving inscription.

The work takes shape as a digital drawing of ephemeral annotations to the fixed cartography of the geopolitical imagination. Lines float across vast distances as shadows and markings enter and exit the frame, challenging the arbitrary way in which we represent the earth: carving it into blocks of space hemmed in by borders, and slices of time boxed into hours.

Longitudes inherit legacies. Some meridians are primed to reign over space and time, others hover in the empty quarter of a map, creating a moving courtyard, a shelter without roof and walls, scanning the horizons of nameless space. A new imagination of cartography allows us to envision new communities. Some lines divide the earth, noting the ends and beginnings of our days; others remain as marks in the sand, erased, but not eliminated, by wind and time. They constantly reappear, asserting their claim as reimagined prime meridians, playfully dislocating the zero-degree axis from its current anchorage at Greenwich, rendering any place, anywhere, as a possible centre of the world.

Every map tells its own story. Our maps read the way they do because of history – and because history can change, so can geography.

The Dislocation of Degree Zero listens to the silences in the telling of these stories and histories. It reads between the lines on the map of the world. It presents itself as a video meditation on map-making, power and the instability of our understanding of space and time.


2013

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 11

Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation