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Meridian walk
2012– on going
Photographic documentation of an impossible attempt to traverse the entire Paris meridian in one day.
This walk will be attempted again, guiding others along the meridian.
890 digital photographs



These 890 photographs document a walk I attempted along the meridian of Paris, to find my place in time. I wanted to trace and understand the paradox of 'real' physical meridian. On the way, I learned about the story of longitude and time measurement in different stages, from conception to today. This is a pavement story, a walk through a city that uncovers, step by step, how we lost the contact measures of time.

I tried to walk the entire nine kilometres of the meridian of Paris in one day. I walked continuously, without pauses for eleven hours. A large part of the way, I was lost because I used the Arago medallions as a guide, 136 bronze medallions that the Dutch artist Jan Dibbets planted in the asphalt in 1996.



The course was difficult. Firstly, the line was not direct. Along the way, I had to navigate many obstacles. There were boulevards, hills, and shopfronts, small houses, the Louvre, the Seine, and cafés that had expanded their premises over the sidewalk. There were also many trees and shrubs, and new asphalt replacing the old. Over time, many medallions have disappeared; lost or stolen by thieves, or vanished under layers of council concrete. I was often bewildered because there was no medallion to provide the north-south direction, by which I could place my body on track.

Whenever I discovered a medallion I felt as if I had found a grounding in the world; that I could belong in that place, that I could travel onwards into time. But if the next medallion was not there, I was aimless again. Every time I came across a hole where I knew a medallion used to rest, I was deeply saddened. And I was sorry when people did not seem to notice the magic beneath their feet.

The resulting photographic essay documents the chance encounters of that day, during which I allowed the camera to swing on its strap and randomly pressed the shutter button so that my body and not my visual cortex manipulated the shots. Presented sequentially as photo and text panels, the series examines a range of poetic and critical questions of time. One such deliberation include the International Bureau of Weights and Measures conjecture that worldwide time should be based solely on atomic clocks and no longer be associated with the place called Greenwich Meridian, due to the perils of coordinating the leap second across the entire world's GPS system.