Greenwich Degree Zero at Hayward Gallery

In Greenwich Degree Zero, Rod Dickinson and Tom McCarthy re-imagine the afternoon of 15 February 1894, when a French anarchist named Martial Bourdin was killed as 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 this building. Lying on the First Meridian, at exactly 0° longitude, the Observatory was a prominent public building, the place from which all time throughout the British Empire and the world was measured and regulated. 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. They present a film made with a hand-cranked Victorian cinematic camera capturing the moment of the Observatory's destruction and photographic images depicting the building's ruins. By adhering to these formal contours, they tie history inextricably to the processes, institutions and technologies through which it is both represented and interpreted.