Like most other instruments of empire used to chart our world, the international prime meridian is an invisible, regnant force. A product of colonial ambition, it was conceived as a solution to regulate time and space with the rise of the shipping and railway industries. Geographically, the meridian is the point at which Earth’s longitude is set at 0˚, delineating so-called east and west. It also governs time, marking the starting point for Coordinated Universal Time, according to which regions measure their time zones. This history is relatively young: the single line was established to center on Greenwich in England during an 1884 conference of delegates from twenty-six countries. Notably, the resolutions they agreed upon are not legally binding.
I’ve never paid much attention to the prime meridian, but I began unraveling its authority upon encountering the work of Sam Tam Ham (Sam Hamilton), an artist from Aotearoa New Zealand and based in Portland, Oregon. Hamilton has been interrogating the prime meridian and its implications for more than a decade through their multi-pronged project Te Moana Meridian. “Its location acts as a geopolitical lens through which the dominant worldview is framed,” they have written, underscoring the white supremacy of this frame that positions London as the “de facto center of the world.”
Ambitious and experimental, Te Moana Meridian transports its viewers beyond linear time and a singular space. It hacks the stasis of clock time—what sociologist Barbara Adam describes as “decontextualized empty time that ties the measurement of motion to expression by number”—with spiritual and cosmic possibility. The work’s driving force and anchor is a proposed resolution, written by Hamilton, for the United Nations General Assembly to formally relocate the prime meridian to its opposite coordinates in the open waters of Te Moana-nui-ā-Kiwa (the South Pacific Ocean). Hamilton has also created artworks that animate this defiantly blue-sky submittal—paintings, a video, and most recently, a live opera that debuted at the Portland Institute of Art (PICA) on September 7. Each component, albeit unevenly, provokes thinking on how an unseen, arbitrarily set line, decisively oriented on Britain during its height as a global hegemonic power, governs our daily realities. Accordingly, each also probes the potentials in us all to disrupt systems that we passively accept and that are rooted in white, Western ambitions. The project’s varying forms guide us to commune and wrestle with questions of how time is defined and parceled, and how it divides and oppresses: in falling into convenience, what do we lose with complacency? Yet Te Moana Meridian refuses definitive solutions, instead using every evolution as a chance to interrogate itself. Occasionally, these works feel weighed down by their specific history or fenced in by the bureaucratic framework of the UN proposal, making me question why Hamilton is choosing to imagine within existing systems.
Many others have critiqued the prime meridian, which replaced a multiplicity of former meridians, as imposing and oppressive. Adam, in her book Time, writes that with the standardization of world time, “the values that come as a package attached to the social relations of clock time cover the globe where they work their imperialism silently, unaided and implacably.” More extensively, the artist and author Rasheedah Phillips has written on the subjugating, violent effects of Western linear time on Black lives, and in 2022 organized the Prime Meridian Unconference, a multidisciplinary symposium to develop new ways of embodying time that privilege the experiences of Black people.
Hamilton’s Te Moana Meridian is similarly focused on collective reimagining, but a kind that attempts seismic, systemic change through political wrangling. The project emerged slowly, more than a decade ago, when they traveled to Sāmoa, whose government had decided then to “move” the entire country west of the international date line, effectively jumping forward in time by a day. Hamilton was struck by the plainness of this decision—that the change could happen at all, requiring just a vote of consent. They eventually began working on what would become the core of Te Moana Meridian, the UN draft proposal. It is more than an artwork for display: Hamilton genuinely aspires to put it to a UN policy vote and has organized three public conferences—the most recent of which accompanied this PICA presentation—held to discuss and refine proposal drafts since 2022.
Big, often overwhelming ideas about our positions within the world have always fueled Hamilton’s art. Their other major work, Apple Pie (2016), filmed in Aotearoa and Sāmoa, is a ten-part video that deals with topics of space, matter, time, and the cosmos through playful, fantastical imagery; a short film, Everyday for 30 Years Nancy Sat on the Street Corner and Watched the Sunset (2017), homes in on the intimate rituals between the artist’s former neighbor, Nancy, and the distant sun.
Though Hamilton has done their most significant work in film, they began to articulate their ideas for Te Moana Meridian in a painting. They wrote out a draft resolution on canvas, and had considered the work complete until another artist, Holland Andrews, visited their studio and intuitively began singing the painting’s densely packed lines. This encounter led to the project’s next iteration, something much more experiential, a video also titled Te Moana Meridian (2022).
Still from Sam Hamilton, Te Moana Meridian, 2022. Courtesy the artist.
In this work, multiple timelines mingle across a row of five screens for twenty minutes that seem to stretch and compress. Two performers stand at podiums—Andrews, in a Portland library, and Mere Tokorahi Boynton, in the New Zealand Parliament Building—and sing a libretto of the proposed resolution in English and te reo Māori. Their voices sound out amid a droning soundtrack of pump organs, not quite in harmony but falling into a consonant pace. Between these institutional sites of history-keeping and -making unfolds hushed footage, scripted and staged by Hamilton, of cycles and currents: an intergenerational choir circling on a Pacific Coast beach; a person slowly spinning a gleaming, golden disk evoking the sun; a mother and daughter kneeling outdoors, holding up seashells and guiding them in circular motions, with the timekeeping Royal Observatory in Greenwich visible in the distance.
When I viewed the video last year, at Portland’s Oregon Contemporary during the Converge 45 triennial, the screens were spread across three adjacent walls from floor to ceiling. Immersed in the cascading visuals and voices of orators and ocean, I fell into a strange current of swirling, swelling time, my focus cleaved and searching, but never lost. I followed strings of Andrew’s voice, almost ecclesiastic in the singer’s delivery, their words wending alongside Boynton’s forceful, grounding chants. But equally alluring were the universally understood whispers of the ocean, unheard but palpable in multiple scenes. I later recalled the poet Dionne Brand’s line: “I do not believe in time / I do believe in water.” The video felt unmoored from any particular temporal domain as the performers’ recitations coalesced and transmuted into a commanding prayer, or a simmering spell whose exact words we don’t necessarily have to fathom to feel moved.
Exhibition view, Sam Hamilton, Te Moana Meridian at Oregon Contemporary, Portland. Photo by Mario Gallucci.
Hamilton’s paintings of the draft’s text were also on view at Oregon Contemporary, and visitors could take posters conveying the proposal’s words. These works are straightforward: the paintings resemble oversize pages of an official report, with a General Assembly letterhead, carrying Hamilton’s proposal in English and te reo Māori in shimmering gold paint; the posters organize the proposal’s words around a large blank circle. But by making the motion legible and physical, Hamilton reminds us that what originally created the abstract existence of the prime meridian was but a document—a signed agreement on how to mediate relationships. And like most documents, it is a text that could be superseded by another. For instance, in Hamilton’s proposal, now in its fifth draft, a decision to relocate the prime meridian to the primordial, unbound “high seas … the truest archivists of history” could “offer a common-use means of orienting global time and space that defers not to colonial authority, but the authority of nature, and our mutual interdependence within it.”
As Hamilton revises this draft, they also open opportunities to engage a more communal, democratic process than did the 1884 conference. The latest chapter in their project, the live opera subtitled How the Prime Meridian Shapes the World, and the Case for Relocating It, positions the audience as not just viewers but witnesses. When the work debuted in September at the Portland Art Museum, we were seated around the perimeter of a dark room, like members of a parliament. Here, the same elements of the video were overlaid into a single setting. Projected on the floor was an expansive, bright-white grid, and at its center, there was a circular black mat. Andrews and Boynton walked around this mat for nearly the length of the 70-minute-long performance, taking turns singing out the full text of the Te Moana Meridian proposal in their respective tongues. Around their seamless revolutions of step and song, dozens of performers—echoing the choir on the beach in the video—slow-danced in a spiral that subtly expanded toward the audience, then receded near the opera’s halfway point. At times they made shh sounds or grazed together rocks and shells, echoing shifting water and wind. An anchor amid this ebb and flow was a figure in bright gold, identified in the program as Thinking Finger, who walked from edge to edge of the grid, cutting through the dancers. Performed by the artist sidony o’neal, they seemed to represent the prime meridian itself, completing the journey to opposite coordinates and fulfilling the vision of a new world order.
Still from Sam Hamilton, Te Moana Meridian, 2022. Courtesy the artist.
The opera’s choreography initially felt like an earnest disruption of the linear clock time of the outside world, embodying multiple radial times—fluid, dynamic times, where slowness trumps efficiency. But compared to the video, which brought us close and face-to-face with the singers, and transported us to the dramatic vistas of coastlines, the opera’s atmosphere felt more formal and less stirring. The chairs and central stage made the windowless room feel almost akin to a lecture hall. Andrews and Boynton recited their parts separately, dictating the meridian’s history and the case to move it. Their voices, brimming with emotion, were powerful to experience, but the uttered legislature was shorn of its previous multiversal synchronicity: of two differently evolving stances entwined as one. Although the opera had gradually forged a meditative space for viewers, effectively drawing me into an otherworldly calm, this transcendence eventually loosened its hold as I deduced the dancers’ repeating choreography and could begin to predict it. Becoming rote, the work fell back into the methodical march of linear time.
Watching the performance, I couldn’t shake the idea that Hamilton was still assigning a lot of authority to the prime meridian. I wondered what moving it would actually change. Why not get rid of it? Why appeal to the UN General Assembly, which gives genociders a platform, and whose ongoing failures to protect Palestinian life most recently exemplify its own power imbalances and lack of political will? Even if Hamilton’s approach invites these nagging questions, it’s a strength of their project that they encourage debate around these very concerns.
Still from Sam Hamilton, Te Moana Meridian, 2022. Courtesy the artist.
At the third conference, held the day after the opera’s debut, they acknowledged during introductory remarks, “I’m very confident with the assertion of the problem, but I’m not confident with my solution.” Speaking to attendees, perched on stadium-like seating, they added: “Where the prime meridian is doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is this consensus to use it.” For Hamilton, the crucial pivot of Te Moana Meridian is around a framework of relations: a contemporary consensus to shift the meridian to the unbound waters of the Pacific Ocean would ultimately be a refusal of European white supremacy and its imposed myths. But their proposed location surfaces other problems, which invited speakers openly interrogated during the conference’s single, three-hours session. The Sāmoan writer and critic Lana Lopesi noted that this site would reinforce the idea of the Pacific region as a politically neutral space devoid of centuries of complex societies and ways of being and relating. “We’re not land and water separately—it’s the whole thing together, and that constitutes Te Moana,” she said. “And that imaginary”—of the Pacific—“continued over our people, over our bodies, as ‘noble savages’ and ‘dusky maidens.’”
Would moving this instrument of colonial hegemony to the Pacific, where independence movements in places from New Caledonia to Hawaii are ongoing, only reinforce imperialist powers? Perhaps one solution, the artist Bogosi Sekhukhuni offered, would be to move the meridian every fifty years or so, tracing the multiplicity of past time-keeping while maintaining a standard.
In truth, countless measures of time have always been practiced within and in spite of standardized time. Lopesi described, for instance, how the Māori lunar system, the maramataka, follows the rising of Matariki (the Pleiades star cluster). I think about the deeply sensorial Japanese microseasons or the Yupno people of the land known as Papua New Guinea, for whom time flows in relation to topography, downhill and uphill. Or Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening work, which the artist hoped would shift people to “enter into a state of timelessness, where they’re not thinking about time, where they’re feeling space.”
Te Moana Meridian, imperfect yet comfortable with its shortcomings, is another such call to expand our perceptions of time. The project’s honest, generative self-criticality, which defies the rigidity of colonial clock time, is encapsulated by a gesture that is one of the work’s simplest but most provocative. During the opera, as the orators read the resolution from scripts on clipboards, they tore off page after page, crumpling and tossing the paper on the floor. The casual disposal reinforced the fallibility of resolutions and, more critically, upended the notion that they have value at all. This was a prescient image echoed in November, when 22-year-old lawmaker Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, standing in New Zealand’s Parliament, ripped up a proposed bill that threatens Māori rights. By the end of Hamilton’s opera, all that remained on stage was the detritus of drafts. A purging of the quest for imposed structure. An open interlude for much more.
