Year: 2008
Medium: Super 8 video transferred to DVD (Edition 1 of 5), (screen or projection based)
Dimensions: 55mins run time, silent, black and white
Brief biography: b. 1966, Ipsden, Oxfordshire, England. Lives and works in Berlin and London.
Simon Faithfull’s film 0°00 Navigation shows an ‘obsessive’ yet playful journey exactly along the Greenwich Meridian.
The solitary figure emerges from the sea in Hampshire, carrying a GPS device to plot his route directly along the 0º00 line of longitude. Any obstacle encountered is negotiated – fences climbed, properties crossed, buildings entered via the nearest windows and hedges crawled through. The figure gradually makes his way up through southeast Britain, through London and the Midlands, and ultimately re-enters the sea at Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire. He enters the sea and slowly swims away further North.
Faithfull explores the hypothetical, geographical construct of the Greenwich Meridian line as a physical route to be explored. His practice has been described as ‘an attempt to understand and explore the planet as a sculptural object – to test its limits and report back from its extremities’. 0° 00 Navigation Part II, A Journey Across Europe and Africa was completed in 2015.
Faithfull lives and works in Berlin and London, teaching at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. He has exhibited widely internationally and has work in the collections of the Arts Council, Government Art Collection, Centre Pompidou Paris and Laboral, Spain.
0°00 Navigation was screened at the Future City festival in MediaCityUK, Salford Quays in April 2014, through a partnership with Quays Culture. The film was acquired into permanent collection in June 2014 under the ‘About the Digital’ strand of collecting.
Artist’s website: http://www.simonfaithfull.org/
Extracts from 0°00 Navigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjP5H5fHOd4
Simon Faithfull, 0º00 Navigation Part I, 2009 (Stills from video). Images courtesy of the artist.