The Absent Meridian
(Toward a Zero-Vector Geography)
2020
Meridians did not always exist. They are not natural features of the Earth’s surface but conceptual artefacts—products of human cognition, negotiation, and power. Unlike mountains, rivers, or coastlines, which emerge from geological and hydrological processes indifferent to human presence, meridians are abstractions projected onto the globe to impose order upon space. They are instruments of orientation that do not arise from the planet’s own morphology but from agreements, conventions, and the historical authority to make such decisions binding. The Prime Meridian, running through Greenwich, is neither a geological inevitability nor an astronomical necessity; it is the outcome of 19th-century geopolitical negotiations that transformed one imaginary line into a global standard. This standard, once codified, became a silent infrastructure, shaping cartography, timekeeping, navigation, and, ultimately, the political regulation of movement across the planet.
Meridians were once rooted in astronomy. Before they became fixed political lines, they were defined by the daily arc of the sun and the shifting patterns of the stars, used to measure time, seasons, and position through celestial events. Ancient navigators and astrologers aligned their sense of place with the heavens, not with a single terrestrial origin. Over centuries, this cosmic reference system was translated into a global cartographic grid, with one meridian elevated above all others. What began as a fluid link between sky and earth became an instrument of terrestrial governance—regulating borders, synchronizing time zones, controlling trade routes, and ultimately restricting freedom of movement. The meridian’s astronomical past survives only as a faint echo within a system now dominated by geopolitical control.
I take an atlas and cut it into five pieces. The act is simple, yet something fundamental shifts. The map, once whole, fractures into multiple possible geographies. The Prime Meridian is no longer an absolute reference, no longer holding the planet in its familiar divisions. With the center gone, coordinates lose their certainty, and space is no longer something to be fixed—it is something to be experienced.
This is the core of Zero-Vector Geography: a geography without imposed directions, where movement is not dictated but emerges. Without the meridian, beyond the grid, space does not disappear—it opens. It becomes fluid, relational, shaped by trajectories rather than dictated by lines of power.
How does the planet exist without the confines of a mapped world? What does it mean to exist in a space where orientation is not defined by coordinates but by relationships, by movement, by flux?
Cutting the atlas is not an act of destruction but an act of release. Without a fixed center, worlds can be reimagined, reassembled, or released. The absence of the meridian does not erase geography—it allows it to unfold, otherwise.
This geography is not the same as the one on the map. It is a geography that invites to move, to rethink the world not as a grid but as a constellation, scattered, shifting, and alive.
This work forms part of a broader research trajectory on Planetary Passports—an inquiry into how the right to move and the right to remain are governed, restricted, and unevenly distributed across the globe. By dismantling the centrality of the Prime Meridian, Zero-Vector Geography addresses the deeper architectures of control that underpin not only spatial orientation but also political mobility. The same cartographic frameworks that fix lines of longitude also fix lines of movement, embedding territorial sovereignty, border regimes, and temporal synchronization into the very fabric of how the world is measured. In reframing geography beyond imposed coordinates, this work aligns with the Planetary Passports vision: to imagine systems of belonging and circulation grounded not in the geopolitical authority of a single meridian or nation-state, but in planetary and celestial relationships that precede—and could outlast—the current order of space and time.
By questioning the apparent simplicity of an ATLAS, which in its compacity and organised appearance effectively seems to hide or ignore the involution and complexity convoluted and entangled in whatever territory. Such work addresses the discontinuity of spatiality and its inherently unstable matter constituted of aesthetic political gestures etc. The gesture of the work proposes a different reading of altered territorial approaches yet to be figured out, aiming to trigger a critical pondering on an old problem of the complex entanglement between the conceptualization of geographies and territories within military neoliberalism, which also remains - in what is now called the Anthropocene - mostly quite unresolved: the breaking down problematic conceptualisations of the ... implication of the division of the earth that stratifies proto ideas of inner/outer, us/other, here/there, calculative/experienced.
Distances, topologies, coordinates and relations are put into question proposing, with this gesture, that they are of different modes of perception and more importantly, pointing to the problematic and unsolved asymmetrical issue that they keep on remaining discriminatory on one hand and privileging on the other, in respect to anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic agents.
Etymologically the word ATLAS (greek) means something like to bear/ endure. Here the atlas is literary divided into lighter and smaller parts. Does it somehow make what it wears more bearable?
Where can the process of imagining other geographies as an artistic gesture carry out about how we connect/relate to the multiple “territories we are connected to, implying that circumstances, things, situations etc. could be different?
On the front cover of the Atlas cut into pieces we see slices of an image that transports the idea of the earth as a blue marble. It is a metaphor that became very popular and can be considered significant in shaping a collective idea of the earth as a blue marble for the last decades. It placed the idea of the earth into a position where it is dominated and controlled from the perspective of humans. Now as we are in the middle of learning differently, already naming this shift of perception, the time we are inhabiting, the Anthropocene, putting exactly this collective idea of the blue marble into question and it is more obvious than ever that the right to survive for all is very much related to an idea of coexisting and shifting how we see the earth, and to figure out other ways of measuring closeness and distance.
While proto-ideas with the Anthropocene seem so preoccupied with conveying perspectives that are down to earth and dealing with these earth issues, to keep the extraterrestrial perspective in mind and address the unresolved absurdities of frontier geographies affecting primarily human concern not to lose sight of. As even though there is now a name for the new epoch we are about to learn - the Anthropocene - it has not catapulted us out of the military neoliberalism based on nation-state building, which is still screwing things up.
It can give birth to many other possible questions like what would an atlas for the new geological age look like that make accessible the fact that the earth is breaking into human thinking?
On extractivist, mining, drug trafficking, identity discourses, tourism, violating economies, migration, sediments of neo-capitalism, political power, nation-state ideologies, military border surveillance etc.
