Art, at its best, is an adventure, an exploration, a journey of talent, skill and commitment that, having experienced it, the audience finds themselves in a different place than they were before, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and perhaps even politically.

For Sam Tam Ham, aka Sam Hamilton, a multi-disciplinary artist hailing from Aotearoa (the Maori name of New Zealand), their artistic adventure has brought them all the way across the world, and their latest piece, the world premiere of Te Moana Meridian; How the Prime Meridian Shapes the World, and the Case for Relocating It, is their attempt at changing it.

Te Moana Meridian is part of the 21st annual TBA, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time Based Arts Festival, running Sept. 5-22. Te Moana Meridian is being presented in the Grand Ballroom of the Portland Art Museum in collaboration with Boom Arts and will be running at 7 p.m. September 6, 7 and 9 and 2 p.m. September 8. Te Moana Meridian had an installation iteration featured at PICA in 2023. 

Te Moana Meridian is an experimental opera, but that phrase doesn’t fully encapsulate the breadth of imagination, intention and ambition at the heart of Hamilton’s vision: It is also an installation, a work of visual art, a dance, and a political effort to create a substantial global cultural change. Art as a force for change is not a new concept. But with Meridian, Hamilton seeks not only to inspire, reveal, expose and lift up (all of which are certainly worthwhile goals) but also to concretely affect policy on a global scale.

And not just any policy. “The whole project,” says Hamilton, “is based on a proposal to quite literally and formally relocate the international prime meridian, which is currently in Greenwich, England, and move it 180 degrees, physically as far as you can get from the current prime meridian to its antipodean coordinate, which would be right in the middle of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa” (the south Pacific Ocean).

Sam Hamilton (Sam Tam Ham is a childhood nickname that he has recently begun using as their professional name — “we’ll see how it works,” they laugh) has never fit into easy categories as an artist. They’ve never tried to. Working in music, visual art and filmmaking, they’ve never felt a need to box themself into one discipline or another.

“Auckland is small,” they say. “You can’t pursue such a siloed approach if you want to have a stable practice. You’ve got to broaden your horizons. I have learned the most as an artist through relationships and overlaps between various things, more than I have from digging deep into a siloed discipline.” Hamilton sees the differences in mediums as surface-level distinctions whose only real significance is functional. Te Moana Meridian is a perfect example of their synthesis of disciplines.

Sponsor

The seed of Meridian was planted a decade ago when Hamilton was making their experimental film, Apple Pie. During the making of that film Hamilton was traveling through the Independent State of Samoa.

While they were making that trip, Samoa was working to have the international dateline, the imaginary geographical demarcation between one day and the next, adjusted so that “Western Samoa’s business/trade days could be on the same calendar as their primary trading partners New Zealand and Australia,” remembers Hamilton. If you Google it now you see the dateline has a drastic hook in the middle of it to accommodate Samoa’s needs.

What struck Hamilton about the event was the sheer arbitrariness of the dateline itself. Unlike the equator, which is necessarily dictated by the rotation of the planet and the distance from the poles, the dateline has no such natural phenomenon to define it. “So, where we decide to measure east-west by is completely arbitrary,” says Hamilton. “It’s just us having a consensus of where to have a common reference for east-west space. That’s the only thing holding it together.”

The step from the dateline to the prime meridian – and its similarly arbitrary conception — was an easy one. Hamilton began to wonder why the prime meridian was located in Greenwich, England — and whether or not it should be. “We do need a common reference point,” they say. “But wherever that common reference point is, it’s always going to privilege that place politically.”

In Hamilton’s view, the placement of the prime meridian is inherently tainted by the history that defined it. “The system we have for understanding time and space,” says Hamilton, “implicitly reinforces white supremacy. The reality is that geopolitics and politics are propped up by the stories that underlie them.” This nugget of a thought got twenty seconds of screen time in Apple Pie, but it never quite left Hamilton’s mind.

Five years later, it’s 2019, and the idea had morphed into something more tangible. After doing some research, Hamilton conceived of a faux United Nations resolution to change the meridian, using the form and language conventions of a typical U.N. proposal. They researched it, wrote it, rendered it on canvas in gold paint, and figured that was that. “I had done the thinking,” remembers Hamilton. “I had produced the artwork to represent this idea. Bam. Done.”

Left: Holland Andrews, principal vocalist in English for the opera version of “Te Moana Meridian.” Photo courtesy Holland Andrews. Right: Project leader Sam Tam Ham. Photo courtesy Sam Hamilton.

Sponsor

Enter Holland Andrews.

As an artist, Andrews, like Hamilton, defies easy description. Certainly, they work in music; but after that, what they do in music unfurls like a Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline. In their own words, Andrews is “a vocalist, composer, producer, and performer whose work focuses on the abstraction of operatic and extended-technique voice to build cathartic and dissonant soundscapes.” 

Andrews and Hamilton had been friends for years, and talked about working together in a more substantial way. That wish led to the kind of bolt-from-the-sky moment that typically only happens in fiction.

“Holland came to my studio,” says Hamilton, “stood in front of the painting and just started to sing the words off the canvas. It was this amazing light-bulb moment. This thing that I thought was the end, this painting – Holland came over and was this key that opened it up. ‘No, no, no, this is not the end. This is just the beginning.’”

The next step on the journey was for Hamilton to bring in his longtime friend and colleague, Maori singer, actor and composer Mere Tokorahi Boynton. Boynton, who Hamilton calls “somewhat of an icon in New Zealand,” has a rich and diverse resume that ranges from appearing in the classic film Once Were Warriors (not for the faint of heart) to being the Director Ngā Toi Māori for the Aotearoa Festival.

What had been almost an impulse on a whim was now becoming something more substantial and profound. The idea of manifesting concrete change began to grow. “I ended up in New York talking to New Zealand’s deputy ambassador to the U.N.,” Hamilton says, laughing. “Aotearoa is a small place. Art can have this interesting way of getting into the political apparatus through the back door.”

“The basic argument,” says Hamilton, “is that the way that global time and space are colloquially, generally and commonly understood today relies – is positioned and anchored by — the prime meridian, and where the prime meridian is located implicitly reinforces British cultural hegemony. In the same way that the British empire went and physically colonized much of the world, the prime meridian has functioned in the metaphysical capacity to do the exact same thing. It’s squashed everyone else’s understanding of time and space, literally erased it in a lot of cases, much in the way the British language has been used to erase indigenous languages.”

Sponsor

So, why the middle of the Pacific Ocean? “Basically,” says Hamilton, “it’s about, where do we want to privilege? The Pacific Ocean is a good antidote to that inherent problem. It wouldn’t be within any political boundaries. It would be in international waters. Which means that it would be under the political jurisdiction of the new U.N. high seas treaty.

“The ocean is a proxy for talking about all the things we have in common. It’s something that touches everyone and everything, that everyone relies on. It’s a place to talk about permanence and borders. You can’t really put up a wall around the ocean and expect it to abide by those arbitrary political boundaries. The ocean does what it does and we are all beholden to it. Not the other way around.”

Hamilton felt acutely aware that if such a proposal was going to gain any traction in the global community, and perhaps especially as the project is a response against colonialism, it had to be expressed in more than just English. To that end, Te reo Maori translator, Rhonda Tibble.

“The idea,” says Hamilton, “is that in order for a proposal like this to get international consensus, the outreach needs to be equitable. In a practical sense, this proposal should be published in every single language. To reach consensus, it has to be produced in all these languages so they can have their input, so they’re not just using the colonial language of English to engage with this project, which creates power dynamics. I can’t do that. But I can start somewhere, and so the place I started was Maori.”

In the piece, Boynton and Andrews go back and forth singing the proposal in Maori and English, respectively. There is not a composed melody line. “Those two singers are so extraordinary, there’s no way that I could compose something that is going to be better than what they can improvise,” says Hamilton. “The work is highly structured but leaves a lot of space for them to fill as they see fit.” Underneath their improvisation is a foundational drone that makes one think of what space would sound like if it had a voice.

sidony o’neal, a PICA veteran who has come up in ArtsWatch before, is yet another multidisciplinary artist (outside of their wife Lauren and their baby, Hamilton doesn’t seem to know any other kind of person). o’neal is not a dancer, per se, but will be doing movement in Meridian. “I think of them like a sextant,” says Hamilton. “They transect the whole performance. They function as a prime meridian. Through gesture and geography they connect all these dots. Think about what makes a constellation a constellation and what makes it a fictive instrument for navigating when you’re out in the ocean. Your ability to connect those dots. sidony is that instrument.”

Throw in an intergenerational choir whose job it is replicate the sound of the ocean, the choir members adorned in black and white costumes every one of which is unique, and a lighting design that Hamilton did themself, and you begin to get some idea of the scope, complexity and imaginative power of Te Moana Meridian. 

Sponsor

Though it is a work of art, and will be fully actualized as such, the idea of presenting at the U.N. is still very much on the Meridian horizon. But Hamilton has no illusions about their capabilities or their role in the ultimate objective of moving the prime meridian. “I’m obviously so incapable of doing that myself. All I’m doing is introducing the idea. I claim no authority whatsoever. That’s why the conference is important, to bring other people in. That’s why talking to the United Nations – they could actually do it.”

 The conference Hamilton speaks of will be at 11 a.m. Saturday, September 7, in the PICA Annex. According to the PICA website, “Te Moana Meridian Conference submits the U.N. policy proposal to rigorous critical debate by a diverse range of thought leaders across the fields of art, culture, science, politics, history, and advocacy. This event at PICA will be the third such convening, following an inaugural conference held in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2022 with Artspace and Vā Moana Pacific Spaces.”

Whew. That’s a lot. Hamilton is nothing if not ambitious, and they have a knack for making you feel like anything is possible. Their ultimate goal is to make the world more equitable for everyone. There are dangers, and Hamilton is aware of his limitations: “I might offend people. I’m ethnically British, so I am deeply entangled in the colonial project of the Western empire. But I have an inherent responsibility to engage in the conversation about how to make it a better world for us all.”