Rod Dickinson and Tom McCarthy
On February 15th 1894, a French anarchist named Martial Bourdin was killed when the bomb he was carrying detonated. The explosion took place on the slope beneath the Royal Observatory in London's Greenwich Park, and it was generally assumed that his intention had been to blow up the Observatory. Nonetheless, despite various theories, the exact nature and motivation of Bourdin's act remained unclear.
In 'Greenwich Degree Zero', Rod Dickinson and Tom McCarthy re-imagine Bourdin's act as a successful attack on the Observatory. They do so by infiltrating and twisting the media of Bourdin's time, reproducing extant newspaper reports re-worked to fit their version of events and presenting a film made with a hand-cranked Victorian cinematic camera capturing the moment of the Observatory's destruction as well as photographic images of the ruins.
- Artwork Details: running time: 50seconds running time: 10 minutes 16 tables, each, 72 x 80 x 60cm 16 reading frames, each, 60 x 70 x 45cm
- Edition: 1 of 3
- Material description: multimedia installation
- Credit line: commissioned by Beaconsfield, 2005 © the artists
- Theme:
- Medium: Installation
- Accession number: ACC11/2008