Te Moana Meridian: How the Prime Meridian Shapes the World, and the Case for Relocating It

Overview

Showcasing the world premiere of the operatic performance in partnership with PICA’s TBA Festival and Boom Arts, Te Moana Meridian: How the Prime Meridian Shapes the World, and the Case for Relocating It is a new experimental opera based on a proposal to the United Nations General Assembly Resolution to formally relocate the international Prime Meridian to the South Pacific Ocean. Created and directed by Sam Tam Ham (Sam Hamilton), the opera features two principal vocalists singing the written text by Sam Tam Ham of the proposal made to the UN, mirroring each other in their receptive languages: Holland Andrews in English and Mere Tokorahi Boynton in Māori. Artist sidony o’neal features an elongated movement.

Sam Hamilton (Sam Tam Ham) is an independent, working class, interdisciplinary artist from Aotearoa New Zealand of Pākehā (English settler colonial) descent, based in Portland, OR. After 20 years of working independently and professionally across experimental music and sound art, moving and still image, painting, writing, performance, stage, cinema, and curatorial projects, Hamilton’s practice today operates more like an ecology than a discipline. A messy but verdant garden full of old and new growth, hidden places, edible arrangements, toxic weeds, garden parties, frolicking, and most importantly, the life-affirming ferment of deep existential entanglement. What physically emerges in any given season through the confluence of this garden depends most simply on what vessel(s) best serve the idea at hand.

The long song

a meandering garden path

Both an entrance and an exit

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