Infidel Meridià

Infidel Meridià (Unfaithful Meridian, 2018) takes as its starting point two significative functions of the Reial Acadèmia de Ciències i Arts de Barcelona (RACAB): the setting of the official time in Barcelona and the implementation and standardisation of the decimal metric system in Spain. Using RACAB’s historical objects and documents as catalysts, Mariona Moncunill puts forward a narrative through the creation of scientific conventions associated with the establishment of quantifying systems and their political and social implications, while also playing with the relationship between time and longitude, the two having been scientifically, poetically and arbitrarily linked in the process of institutionalising the measurement of time and distance. The installation consists of a video and a 3D printer in constant operation, programmed to print lines equivalent to one ten of a millionth of the quadrant of the earth’s meridian, i.e., one metre. The one-metre lines generated by the printer constitute a simple, formal translation of the relationship between time and space.