Tomas Cloma’s ‘Freedomland’: Between empire & archipelago in the South China Sea, 1974

Alex P. Dela Cruz

In 1956, Filipino lawyer and businessman Tomás Cloma issued a Notice to the Whole World declaring several islands located within a large hexagonal swathe of the South China Sea as a sovereign state named ‘Freedomland’, of which he was the head. Freedomland was Cloma’s utopia. He hoped that the legal status of statehood would prevent other governments, including that of his native Philippines, from interfering in his bid to make a fortune from a valuable resource–guano–from bird excrement which was abundant in the islands. This paper describes how Cloma deployed legal arguments on the discovery and occupation of territory to characterise the South China Sea as an empty space in which his own utopia might flourish. The Philippines originally distanced itself from Cloma’s claims. But once the Philippines started exploring the Spratlys for oil in the 1970s, its account of which islands and waters formed the Philippine Archipelago shifted to encompass Cloma’s Freedomland. During this time, the legal definition of archipelagos became the subject of debates at the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (1974–1982). Soon enough, the Philippines was repeating Cloma’s claims to Freedomland. I argue that the Philippine claim to the unity of the archipelago’s islands and waters was not based on a stable or natural geographical fact. Rather, it was a claim that reflected a shifting account of islands and waters that was contingent upon the location of resources that the post-colonial state deemed valuable for its own ends.

Alex P Dela Cruz (he/his/him) is a PhD candidate at Melbourne Law School where he traces continuities between empire and international law by reconstructing a history of the archipelago as a jurisdictional form in the Law of the Sea Convention. His thesis pays attention to specific practices that led to the formation of certain islands and waters into a single unit called the Philippine Archipelago. Alex previously obtained an LLM from Melbourne Law School as an Endeavour Postgraduate Scholar of the Australian Government.

Underwater Archives: Exploring Hydraulic Seas of the Volga River (1930-1970)

Nastia Volynova

This project offers to think about bodies of water that complicate the divide between the “natural” and “artificial” (Helmreich, 2017) — human- made water reservoirs, or hydraulic seas. Such reservoirs usually appear on abandoned lands as a result of violent industrial expansion. Assemblages of nonhuman agents, their water flows can operate as a material witness (Shuppli, 2020) that register and preserve records of industrial invasions. While these records contribute to the existing modes of archiving, they also problematise existing taxonomies that shape the archive. The project explores five Russian water reservoirs — colloquially known as “seas” — to interrogate the progressive narrative of Soviet modernity by producing a water-based narrative that challenges this reductive framework. As part of The Great Volga (1930s-1970s), a large-scale industrial endeavour that reorganised the flow of the Volga Riverto supply a slew of new infrastructure developments, these reservoirs were constructed on the ruins of the submerged towns. Their histories remain underrepresented, and their archival records are kept concealed. However, water oscillations disclose lingering residues and illuminate historiographical voids. By engaging with objects discovered in field trips to these towns, such as sculptures, photographs, and architectural models, this project offers a way to reconsider the histories of the drowned places that persist underwater, in-between spaces, in memory, and through material artefacts. The project takes the shape of a video essay. For the conference, excerpts from this video essay will be shown (10 mins max), followed by a commentary from the author.

Nastia Volynova is an interdisciplinary researcher and writer with a background in art history. Nastia explores narratives, water and former Soviet spaces. She holds a Postgraduate diploma in Curating and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a member of residues of wetness research collective, which operates as a digital archive of watery imaginaries, their ontologies, and epistemologies. Her writing has appeared on e-flux, Refract Journal, syg.ma and others. In 2021, as a research fellow she joined the Terraforming programme (Strelka Institute). Currently based in Moscow, Nastia is a resident at Garage Studios (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art).

Centering Water as Extra-Human Nature in Northern Low Countries

Fathun Karib Satrio

The paper will focus on the interaction between the Dutch Empire and water as extrahuman agencies in the processes of transition from feudalism to capitalism from 1300 to 1500. Extra-human nature conceptualizes as part of the relations between the human organization and extra-human flows and substances in the web of life through the logic of double internality (Moore 2015, 8). The logic transcends the relations of humans and extra-human (environment, water, climate, soil condition, animals) as bundled in the internal relations and coproduces environment making in the web of life (Moore 2015, 5, 77). The paper argues that the Dutch path towards capitalist development involved overcoming, containing, and managing water. This transformed and united the provinces in the Northern Low Countries as one of the hegemons that could pass through the medieval crisis experienced by Europe in the history of the capitalist world-ecology. However, several questions remain. How did the Dutch initiate this process? Did the Dutch transform and reorganized nature as one of the strategies in its transition? How did the Dutch overcome and conquer water and transform the element into their source of strength? I argue that to understand how the Dutch established their ecological regime, we must explore the transition from feudalism to capitalism and examine how water affected the processes of agrarian change. The Dutch experience as unique as their geographical location meant that its population frequently encountered rivers, seas, and water-associated threats. The Dutch's ability to reorganize nature, particularly water, enabled them to become one of the hegemonic powers of capitalist world ecology.

Fathun Karib Satrio is a sociology lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatullah (UIN) Jakarta, Indonesia. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology, State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton and working on his dissertation project on the Lapindo Mudflow Disaster as part of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene era. His previous master's work focuses on the land exclusion and political economy of disaster related Lapindo Mudflow in East Java, Indonesia. Karib, also known as Punkademic, is a vocalist of Cryptical Death, a grinding hardcore punk band with an academic profession. He was involved in independent music movements from 1995 to2002 and started his academic career by writing and researching early punk movements and identity formation in Jakarta from 1990-2001. His current research interest is world-ecology,Dutch transition to capitalism, critical agrarian studies, Anthropocene/Capitalocene, political economy of disaster, commodity frontiers, colonial relations, and empire-frontier making