Silvie-thesis outline
THESIS OUTLINE
This thesis will be a journey, voyage, through time, recounting the socio economic development and forceful spatial expansion of The Netherlands, from the perspective of the sea. The sea at once ancient and new everyday, local and global, shapeshifting and plural, is a witness, a source of creation and destruction. An infrastructure for trade and transport.
INTRODUCTION
The 'Discovery of the Millennium': the existence of water memory shows that water retains, collects information about where it has been and what has traversed it. It functions as an archive, a record of time. Water and time are inextricably linked to one another. Time is said to have come from the word tide, the same holds for the Dutch equivalent getij derived from tijd. 2 tides a day, created by an intermix between the gravitational forces of the sun and the moon, and the rotation of the earth. The sea with its waves crashing on the shore is like a metronome. What would the accumulated songs of the sea sound like?
The sea has seen the first maritime expeditions, the transition of VOC ships, the cradle of capitalism, into VOC cargo ships, organic shells replaced by Off-shore Shell refinery platform, while its waters are rising. The chances crashing into a containership is equally as big as that of crashing into a whale on the open sea
CHAPTER 1: The Tide: The Moon and the Merchant
Harbour
"If the Moon pulls the tides, it also rules the market" (Alice Sparkly Cat)
In Astrology the Moon is related to material fortune.
The sailors looked up at the stars to navigate. Expeditions and imperialism driven by hunger not by technological invention - what came on the market in the Netherlands (counter example of China).
The moon is only visible half of the time, through reflecting the light of the sun.
Visibility always comes at the cost of the invisibility of something else.
"The sea, or water, is the great medium of circulation established by nature, just as money has been created by man for the exchange of products" (Alfred Thayer Mahan, Naval Strategy).
"If the stock market is the site in which the abstract character of money rules, the harbour is the site in which material goods appear in bulk, in the very flux of exchange ... But the more regularised, literally containerised, the movement of goods in harbours, that is, the more rationalized and automated, the more the harbour comes to resemble the stock market" (Allan Sekula)
Asymmetrical exchange.
"Debt creates currency" (Sparkly Cat p. 117)
Empty ships that come back full. Extractivism.
CHAPTER 2: The Deluge
At the core of the origin story of The Netherlands is the control of water. Control in the name of protection and control in the name of expansion: the annexing of land from the sea and overseas.
"The [Great] flood is a metaphor for The Netherlands as a phenomenon." (Geuze p. 8)
This text refers to the Netherlands as able to resist the Great Flood and was carrying out, further the work of God. Blessed by divinity. They looked at the past but forgot to look at the future. I don't think the Great flood has been - i think it is yet to come.
CHAPTER 3: Liquid land
Liquid financial markets
Liquifying land —> loss of firm ground —> "the problem of a world of floating, nonreferential signs, the creation of value from nothing, has been further intensified"
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Klose, A. (2016). Container Principle. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Mit Press.
2. J Michelle Coghlan (2020). The Cambridge companion to literature and food. Cambridge Cambridge University Press.
3. Fox, D. (2019). Limbo. Fitzcarraldo Editions.
4. Sparkly Cat, A. (2021). Post-colonial Astrology.
5. Adriaan Geuze and Olof Koekebakker (2005). The flood : 2nd International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam ; catalogue ; [26 mei - 26 juni 2005]. Rotterdam: Internationale Architectuur Biënnale.
6. THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE. (2017). Students: Shipping Tales. [online] Available at: https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/09-islands/students-shipping-tales-christina-varvia [Accessed 3 Nov. 2021].