Longitude - Davíð Brynjar Franzson

During the height of the Napoleonic wars, the Royal Danish watchmaker gave his son - Jorgen Jorgensen - a ship to fight the English. At first opportunity, the son - a devoted Anglophile - surrendered to the English under house arrest in London, he convinced an English merchant to break the Danish trade monopoly on its colony Iceland. On arrival in Reykjavik - discovering mass starvation from the trade monopoly - he captured the Danish governor and declared himself "protector of the island".

His reign lasted 40 days.

Longitude is an exploration of the contradictory identities - hero / traitor / colonizer / liberator - that an individual occupies when his actions are viewed from different ideological perspectives. It explores how the breach between internal and societal ethics cause dissonance between these perceived identities, and how languages/taxonomies create conflicting identities that name what is seen and felt in a process of colonization.

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