| Zigzagging across the waters of the Pacific Ocean, the International Date Line (IDL) is the imaginary line on the earth that separates two consecutive calendar days and indicates the boundary line between “today” and “tomorrow.” Despite its name, the precise location of the IDL is not fixed by any international law, treaty, or agreement. Even today, no law proclaims that the International Date Line exists. Still, most globes and maps of the world include it. In 1995, Kiribati, a small archipelago nation in the South Pacific that uncomfortably straddled both sides of the IDL for hundreds of years, unilaterally decided to bend the line’s course by 2,000 miles, so that the entire country could be living on one day rather than split in a time paradox, half divided between “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” |  |
Julieta Aranda
Zigzagging across the waters of the Pacific Ocean, the International Date Line (IDL) is the imaginary line on the earth that separates two consecutive calendar days and indicates the boundary line between “today” and “tomorrow.” Despite its name, the precise location of the IDL is not fixed by any international law, treaty, or agreement. Even today, no law proclaims that the International Date Line exists. Still, most globes and maps of the world include it.
In 1995, Kiribati, a small archipelago nation in the South Pacific that uncomfortably straddled both sides of the IDL for hundreds of years, unilaterally decided to bend the line’s course by 2,000 miles, so that the entire country could be living on one day rather than split in a time paradox, half divided between “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” As a result of Kiribati’s taking its claim on “today,” the line currently bulges east by 150 degrees, farther east than Honolulu. This spasm in the IDL, caused by Kiribati’s ability to literally “move time,” makes me question my understanding of political power. In the present historical narrative, we tend to equate power with force, and to perceive it as a well-seasoned mixture of strength and wealth. So seeing a little-known, impoverished country like Kiribati, exercised political power over the imaginary to choose its own substantive position in time, altered my definition of what power can be.
Actions like Kiribati’s time shift, take place in the geopolitical arena, but their poetic reverberations carry them much further than mere policy making. Though we are conditioned to experience “time” as a linear passage, measured conveniently by clocks, calendars, and other devices, isn’t it possible that the markers that we use to signal it: “yesterday,” “today,” and “tomorrow” are an imposition? Can’t we instead be the arbiters of our own experience of time?Enamored of the idea of experiencing a time paradox firsthand, I traveled to Kiribati, 33 islands in the middle of nowhere, the doldrums. I knew the history of the place (a nuclear test site, the ground of a disastrous WWII battle between Japan and the U.S.), but carried away with travel preparations, I gave little thought to actually being there. I think I mostly expected to arrive at a tropical paradise with beautiful sunsets, and a few metal plaques commemorating any historical events that needed commemoration. Instead, what I found in Kiribati was the landscape of absolute standstill. Nobody has bothered to clean up and archive the artifacts of years past, so time there is frozen at an uncannily cinematic moment: the crossroads between the movies Fitzcarraldo and Apocalypse Now. A time paradox much bigger than I could have imagined. A sense of past that is pure present, past that hasn’t become historicized because it has not been consumed. A past that appears both completely detached from the events of its own history, yet absolutely immediate and available as experience.
I think about time and its monuments while I walk on a beach that is littered with flotsam from WWII, rusted skeletons of war. Amongst the wreckage, there is a heap of tangled 16mm film lying next to the remains of a movie camera. It took me the best part of a day to untangle it. 16mm film was used extensively for wartime recordings during the Second World War, so I have chosen to imagine that the film was stranded in Betio beach since 1943. As for the film itself, it bears no traces of whatever incident took it there. It is irrelevant to wonder if it was exposed or not, as most of the emulsion has been eaten away by the algae, the salt, and the sand. So I have to look at it harder, to engage and force myself to read what is hidden in the film in the absence of a concrete image, since what is left in the celluloid is just this: a pure cinematic moment, the imprint of time upon a time-based medium, history recorded as an act of indifference to itself.
