Sarah Jury Curator / Writer

Unincorporated Land

Unincorporated Land - Published by Aspidistra Issue 2 March 2011

TO: Persons Unknown- this is the phrase that I found in front of me as I walked with A.W. on my way to the Surrey Quays Odeon, on an Orange Wednesday. We were walking through Bridge House Meadows (a park, incidentally, not on Google Maps) when we found a Notice of Hearing taped to one of the few lampposts along the path behind Mill Wall, surely a poor effort on the court's part to deliver their message. Within this tiny park, that covers the ground where the old dog track lay, live 80 illegal immigrants. Over the last 2 years I have never seen the 40 tents that are nestled deeply in the undergrowth, or ever heard neighbourhood complaints. But it is true, that what looks like a small woodland music festival, is just there. The group are self-sufficient and live an insular lifestyle, they could be on an island for all the integration they have with the outside world. I wonder how they govern themselves within the settlement, whether through feudal or democratic systems. Unfortunately at this point in the Notice of Hearing document, the local wildlife gets prioritised over these 80 Unknowns Persons. Japanese knotweed is an invasive species that grows abundantly and which is culled every year. Sand lizards are local to South Bermondsey and hibernate there in October. The knotweed killing is done annually to fit around the lizards' hibernation pattern. The outcome for the Persons Unknown is that they have to move out of their settlement in time for this sequence of events to occur. The only offence caused by these Persons Unknown's is standing in the way of a need to oust an herbaceous, invasive species. The Sand Lizard's preservation is key to preserve the order of things.

Islands as 'toy societies' have manipulability, like playgrounds for experimenting with hierarchical and feudal control and are often used for legal experiments or legal innovations. The Barclay twins bought Brecqhou, an island of Sark. Sark has its own set of laws based on the Norman law, it is a self- governing British crown dependency. Brecqhou was apparently left off the map when they first outlined the territory of Sark, so it is arguably an orphaned land. Palmyra Atoll, in the North Pacific, was orphaned when the maps of Hawaii were drawn up and inexplicably forgotten. When the historians say inexplicably, they negate that when the US decided to appertain the Pacific islands for their worth in Guano, they realised somewhere along the way that Palmyra has no Guano, so it 'fell' of their map. Their map. Maps are the most stealthy and rife propaganda left. How governments can still get away with having subjective maps is very dubious but hard to revoke. In the west we assume the all-seeing Google Maps will guide us, but there are many errors, either mistakes purposeful falsities, some of which have caused military operations, such as in Nicaragua where the Costa Rican president and former guerrilla leader Daniel Ortega admitted using Google maps instead of official map, and when the Google map showed error in the boarder region, he launched a conflict. I'd like to know how this happens. I type 'world map' into my search engine and look through the images of maps. The continent placement and size differ massively. The aim ultimately is to alter perceptions of power and to belittle non-colonial powers, which works horribly well. Peter's Projection is meant to be the real deal, but to be honest, how would anyone know without measuring the world's continents themselves?

Back to the ownership of islands, or lack thereof. Palmyra became only vaguely related to the US territories, as an unincorporated island. It is by no way en route to statehood but no doubt the US will dictate them when they have time. Brecqhou is not orphaned anymore; David and Frederick Barclay dictate its governance. They even eschewed Brecqhous' natural motherland, by closing all their establishments on Sark when their Brecqhouian representatives were not voted into the feudal system, a feudal system that Frederick and David had been foraying with since they bought the island and challenged the islands law of primogeniture and anti-vehicular laws. Both Brecqhou and Sark are merely 60km off French coast and 1200km from Britain. These islands are foreign in a domestic sense but the security they feel, nestled in the English Channel with the 30th richest patrons in the world, affords the inhabitants an attitude of eccentricity that lacks any sense of consequence. Perhaps the U.S. territory of Guantánamo Bay exemplifies the antithesis of the lax attitude to the ownership of Sark. It's location is vividly cut out of Cuba. I was using Google maps to look at this, which I have mentioned is not a good idea, but it can illustrate the grey borderlines removing a chunk from Cuba. The words Utopia and Guantánamo Bay don't lie well together, utopian connotations are usually positive and liberating ones, yet nonetheless the territory is still a isolated area that is self-sustaining, with a muti-faceted design for living. Alienation wouldn't exist in a true utopia, as inhabitants wouldn't be aware of an outside. In existing socialites that have utopian characteristics hostilities resonate around awareness and then negotiation of departures and arrivals. The U.S. claims that their perpetual lease of the U.S. territory of Guantánamo Bay is valid because one lease payment check was (accidentally) cashed by Havana, proving Cuba's ratification of the lease. The U.S. has complete jurisdiction control while Cuba maintains sovereignty...a word that affords Cuba no rights but that lends the U.S. a vale of ambiguity in front of their detention camp/ Navel Base. A territory = section of earth belonging to... The ambiguity also allows the US to apply separate legislation and law, which they manipulate to avoid altering that of the US mainland's statehood. In short, to make those imprisoned there, persons unknown. The phrase 'Persons Unknown,' comes in here because it is unclear which country the prisoners have citizenship or residing rights to. If you are not a citizen of somewhere you are Unknown.

There is a poem called 'The Gardener's Dream,' in which a gardener is seduced by new species of flowers wanting to grow in his garden; a garden in which, ordinarily, he grows only roses. He realises his mistake, that 'with not point in comparison, many ideas will become confused'. This poem was written in communist China by a strongly rightist adviser, Ai Qing, we are now generations since and are dealing with the struggles of allowing all the flowers in. In reference to every animal, mineral and vegetable, there has become invasive species, preserved species and a gardener.

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