HYDRARCHY
Since time immemorial, the sea has been an exceptional space ? not just because of its power of fascination, but also because of its nature as a territory of exception. Creatures from the human imagination have populated its waters, which were also used as a cleansing space by medieval Catholic European culture, plied by Ships of Fools and of other undesirables that society wanted to wash its hands of. For a long time, seas were also the limits of the known world, of what could be mapped and hence controlled ? from terra incognita to hic sunt dracones. The seas were and still are a space in which legal, moral and social codes and structures are suspended. And they are history?s battleground, from which empires and global trade systems have been imposed, but also from which grassroots resistance networks have been created, such as alliances of pirates and runaway slaves, or mutinies that sparked rebellions in ports during revolutions.
Hydrarchy is a term used by radical historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000), to designate ?two related developments of the late 17th century: the organization of the maritime state from above, and the self-organization of sailors from below.?
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Territory
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Resistance
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Borders, or the solid seas
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Suspension
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The ship
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Liquid subjects
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Islands as spaces of social experimentation
Territory
Who says that history is land-centric? From triangular trade to the consolidation of a capitalist economic system, today the sea is still the stage for global trade, with the shipping container as the minimum unit of capital exchange.
Resistance
Drexciya is an underwater country populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown off slave ships on the way to America. The babies adapted to breathing underwater in their mothers? wombs, and developed new forms of intelligence and language as a result of overcoming an industry of death and the historical injustice that had befallen them. A quintessentially marine Afro-futurist project, the myth of Drexciya poses a series of narratives that challenge, criticise and destabilise modernity, technology and history, simultaneously navigating the past, the present and the future.
Borders, or the solid seas
What happens when maritime space is militarised and dominated by sophisticated vision technology, where bodies are controlled and movement is monitored?
Suspension
In the liquid territory of the sea, the codes and laws that apply on land are suspended. International waters, ?offshores? and tax havens allow gambling cruise ships and floating sweatshops and jails to exist, but they also make spaces of normative subversion possible, such as:
The ship
Ships have always been floating microcosms, life-size reproductions of cities and social systems in which the captain is the feudal lord.
Liquid subjects
But at the same time, these spaces floating far from the rules that apply on land also become spaces for the circulation of influences, from port to port, from coast to coast: with women stowaways who pass themselves off as men, and where sexuality and gender become liquid.
Islands as spaces of social experimentation
The island has been a literary and philosophical trope for social experimentation ? from Plato?s Atlantis to Utopia, Treasure Island, the unnamed islands in Shakespeare?s The Tempest, Dr Moreau and Lord of the Flies. Conveniently isolated, islands can be used as a setting in which the complex normative relationships of social spaces are tested, turned upside down, warped and experimented with.