Vives was in conversation with CHR staff and fellows on the day of the handover and explained that “his really radical perception was the idea of the apeiron, which is the great infinite. He didn’t see the world as at the centre. He saw it as floating in a great infinite space.” Often regarded as the father of Western cosmology, Anaximander proposed, that the earth floats freely in space – suspended in the apeiron – and the sky continues not only above but beneath our feet. He speculated on the plurality of worlds and the ceaseless flux of the cosmos, laying foundations for Greek astronomy.
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That was the beginning of what one would call Western astronomy. However, of course people looked at the stars throughout the world and in particular the evidence of early astronomers and oral traditions in Africa. All the markers that they put in place to align with the constellations are well documented. So in relation to the idea of the world and its shaping, a lot of the borders and the idea of nations came through travel and conquest. In looking at the world and thinking about travel, conquest and colonialism – what guided it – I decided to submerge a particular part of the world, and that’s the Northern Hemisphere and the West.
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So while The Sky Beneath draws on Anaximander’s vision of the apeiron and the symbolic history of the time-ball as a Western device for measuring and asserting temporal order, its deeper aim is to disrupt inherited geographies and fixed perspectives. It proposes an alternate worldview: one that recentres the Global South, dissolved colonial borders, and reimagines the Earth not as a divided map, but as a drifting planet shaped by deep time and shared horizon. It is a meditation on cosmology, disorientation, and the human condition within the vast unknown.
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This particular work was for a series of works that I developed in response to salvaging about three hundred hand-drawn star-charts from the Jagger Library burn. They were so heavily burnt they were about to be disposed of, amd I went there on the last day when they were carting them off and I found this, they just looked like bags of burnt paper, but when I took them home and dried them there was the entire Southern Hemisphere constellations, and that’s really what got me interested in the charts, stars, and maps.
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In subverting the Western and Northern Hemispheres, The Sky Beneath “has the properties of a fallen time-ball” – once a critical maritime signalling device that enabled navigators at sea to calibrate their chronometers by the transit of the sun and stars, essential for calculating longitude. The sphere’s broken spire points toward the South and East.
Etched into the sphere’s surface is not a map of nations, but the hidden geography of the ocean floor – an unfamiliar world of submerged ridges, trenches, and abyssal plains. The Southern Hemisphere is placed at the centre, with the African continent – and the southern tip of Africa – rising as a dominant high point. Vast regions of the Northern and Western Hemispheres lie submerged, their outlines eclipsed by an inverted cosmology. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge – the world’s longest mountain range – cuts across the seafloor, evoking the tectonic drift and deep-time ruptures that support the widely accepted theory of Pangaea.
In South Africa, the first time-ball was erected in Observatory, Cape Town – close to the CHR’s Iyatsiba Lab – being relocated in the 1860s to Signal Hill – its visibility from the harbour obscured by the growing city. In the 1930s, it was installed as the V&A Waterfront clocktower, where it remained a landmark until its removal in early 2025. Its movement was long triggered electronically by the South African Astronomical Observatory, echoing Greenwich and other maritime centres of the colonial world.