The Bureau of Longitudes Restored

We’re excited to announce that The Bureau of Longitudes ‘Volume I’ has been archived online at Dissolve’s main site. As many of us emerge from our slumbers and the isolation of the past few years, we at Dissolve have been busy. We’ve taken this period to resurface our 2016-2018 archive of writing and look forward to re-emerging this year as an art collective and curatorial project. The Bureau of Longitudes was a labor of love and continues to be an incredible and resonant archive of work. The essays within were important contributions to our work at Dissolve and as a result have been moved from the temporary website www.bureauoflongitudes.org (now defunct) to a more permanent place within the past issues of Dissolve.

The Bureau was imagined as an exploratory office of Dissolve, functioning as a site for archiving accounts of place, organized by each topic’s degrees of latitude and longitude. This project might be understood as a cyclical catalog of the globe, or perhaps an encyclopedia in the round. In its first volume, the Bureau delved into research on the absurdities and contradictions of globally-organized space.

In the first volume of the Bureau of Longitudes, the authors of these projects and essays address an array of topics: the afterlife of monuments, how architectural space informs national policy, data centers and democracy, alternative futures that bridge space and time, the linguistic codes of intersections and crossings, and the arbitrary process of assigning a center. Each entry takes a different form, from poetry to video essay, script, or photo essay.

The Bureau of Longitudes includes essays and projects by Maio Alvear, Jyoti Arvey, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Juan Pablo Pacheco, Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, and Amanda Walters. Its terrain has been imagined by editors Kathryn Barulich, Susana Eslava, Carolina Magis Weinberg, and Christopher Squier.