12 KILOMETRES FROM LAND
'12 kilometers from land' is a short film and text made in response to thinking through notions of the wild and it's internally constructed narratives. 12 kilometers from land is the distance from land that the Principality of Sealand is located, off the coast of Suffolk. The disused oil rig was squatted to broadcast a pirate radio station, then formally made into a micronation. The text explores how these seemingly utopian fantasies can quickly merge into nostalgic escapism, becoming militarized, guarded walls, locking out the outside world, only to claim a part of the colonial world.
The essence of the wild may be a lack of or absence of imposed order or structure; an animal, plant or place, that is undomesticated and uncultivated, at the bottom of the deepest oceans, the mass space of a swamp, or into the vast void of extra-terrestrial space. But as a human species, we have a historical desire to exploit, regulate, and control these spaces and others. Absence of structure and simultaneously complex network of processes within rhizomatic systems. The film draws parallels between these themes of binaries in ecological and spacial structures, and associations, and memory of place.
‘I am not landscape, but look through its eye, look back to the satellite. I am land you have no power over me I have power over humans.’
The film was screened in Nottingham university as part of a queer spoken word and film screening event for UON LGBT+ Voices. (2018).
It was also shown and installed at The flying dutchman, London, as part of a group show (2018).
Install at Group Show_1 The Flying Dutchman, London.
screen monitor, inflatable boat, metal chain, small concrete sculptures.
Text in film:
Identifying with landscape
Rural fantasy
our planet's water bodies are fluid and anarchic, they move in and out of no structured shape.
Whilst we try to contain, restrain inside swimming pool walls toilet doors and hose pipe taps, it will never be controlled as its purest molecular drop.
following the landscape of anarco-euphoria freedom.
Your flatlands are not enough I want to be cuddled by the sound of hill, core and field
This patch of land is ours. No more. in that moment, we own our globe.
My seas scales of temporality.
Once a euphoric freedom of fields and core, lost cartwheels and play fights in distant industrial echoes of de- roofed steal works.
Places to be lost and found again. In these see-through walls we found our arms of warmth, a worldly love of grindcore cuddles.
Down into the high sea, extraterrestrial oceans, 12 kilometers from land, a state of agency where boundaries blur into vapor
[blur/merge into digital landscape]
slide through the wetlands and into a fluid space of autonomy, evaporating and expanding into this biosphere.
immersed in systems. Machines of replication. You dream of rural utopianism.
constant movement set in digital concrete for the land to not notice. Away from these places it becomes calm and light,
the architectures of binary margins have become mountains, fields, skies, seas.
The connection wires and cables disrupting the natures sky's horizons.
The pylons are the only thing that dissects the space. Disconnected comfort in these metal monsters and spaghetti telephone wires, grounding me in where I am.
I am not landscape, but look through its eye look through its eye, look back to the satellite.
I am land you have no power over me I have power over humans.
I think of the substance of liquid, landscapes and forms of water bodies feel like fluxes of spaces, a fluid utopia, where different ecosystems grow.
Identifying with landscape
Rural fantasy