Elisa Kim - Atlas of the Sea — Underwater New York

Elisa Kim, A Maritime Case Study for the Republic of Namibia, 2019. Exhibition: Nationalizing the World’s Maritime Commons, Then and Now, 2009 | 2019, Aula Gallery Santa Reparata International School of Art, Florence, Italy, 2019.

Elisa Kim’s project Atlas of the Sea is both a cartographic and political inquiry that visualizes a new oceanic spatial order c. 2017–present, including the creation of a new set of geopolitical territories and the delineation of their borders along the ocean floor. These territories are authorized under Article 76 of the 1982 United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea, which grants nation-states sovereign access to the ocean floor for extractive purposes. She spoke with UNY editor Nicole Miller about the work of women in cartography, embodied ways of knowing, and the collective labor required to fathom the deep sea.

Nicole Miller: How did you first get interested in mapping the ocean floor?

Elisa Kim: I grew up by the sea and was on the swim team as a child. From ages five to twenty, I was in the swimming pool every day for two hours. The relationships I had with my swimming friends were incredibly intimate, which may have had to do with the way that we shared the space of the water. Water has a way of breaking down boundaries between people; there’s liquidity to one’s personal space. I think that played a large role later in my interests as a scholar.

I was really interested in questioning the privileged agency of the line—the idea that the line might divide a space or provide a non-porous boundary between one space and another. That ultimately led me to think about the coast as a liminal space between land and water—and it led me to a broader study on bordering and border regimes.

MILLER: Were there maps that made an impression on you as you were developing your own inquiries and practices?

KIM: I came across Marshallese stick charts, which were three-dimensional tools that the Marshallese and other Pacific Islander nations used to navigate the sea. I love the idea that there’s a way to read and understand the sea through an experience in one’s body, rather than through a visual, two-dimensional reading. Another type of mapping that captivated me was Aboriginal Australian dream songs, which are poems and songs for moving through the landscape. The dream songs are based in storytelling and the imagination, but also in experience and landmarks, rather than a planimetric or top-down view of space.

MILLER: You’re interested in the ways that a map might establish connections or blur boundaries, rather than primarily drawing distinctions—which goes against the grain of rationalistic forms of mapping in the West. Did you find models for your work in the U.S.?

KIM: Marie Tharp inspired a lot of my work. She was part of a large cohort of women recruited into the fields of geology and cartography during WWII and the Cold War. As a member of a research team at Columbia University’s Lamont Geological Observatory beginning in the 1950s, Tharp was the first person to draw the ocean floor, using bathymetric data from research ships.

Because she was a woman, Tharp wasn’t allowed to join expeditions at sea. She stayed in the lab, where she translated sonar data into hand-drawn images of the ocean floor. Until then, we hadn’t really seen the ocean floor in full. Her drawings revealed the mid-Atlantic Ridge and provided evidence for the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift. Her images remind me of the Blue Marble—the 1972 photograph of Earth taken from space—which also demonstrated the power of seeing the totality of the landscape.

Woven through her story is the constant undermining of her work. Her lab partner, Bruce Heezen, used to erase her drawings because he doubted their veracity. She was written out of the scientific papers that resulted from her work and wasn’t credited for much of her labor until the end of her life. But her story is a testament to the idea that people who are drawn to the work of the sea tend to be collaborative. Maybe I shouldn’t generalize, but I think it tends to be a woman’s project.

MILLER: Yes! That’s certainly been my experience working with the waterways in New York. In his book Map Worlds: A History of Women in Cartography, Will van den Hoonaard notes that among atlas makers, women have traditionally played a role associated with “gathering” knowledge: research, compilation, assistance, preparation of materials; men are more likely to be project directors, chief cartographers, presidents, or contributors. Thinking about how Tharp collated and imagined the data collected by her male counterparts, I wonder if some of our assumptions about value across these forms of labor are based in our assumptions about gender.

KIM: Of course, we know this to be the case in many other fields as well. In mapping in particular, there’s a type of intuitive work embedded in the process that informs the construction of these artifacts, which doesn’t get talked about. I go back to the idea of the dream songs. You might imagine women and children moving through a space and sharing stories or dreams or poems as a way of navigating or relating to their landscape. There’s something incredibly powerful about knowledge gathered through one’s body or hands. I talk with my students about the knowledge we gain through the act of making or drawing, rather than through the more conventional modes of knowledge production, like reading and writing.

In the case of Marie Tharp, I was really inspired by the way she tried to draw what we can’t see, because this is what architects do. We’re always trying to project a reality from something that’s invisible or unbuilt. The way that she translated the sounding data into visual information is rational, but at the same time, her imagination must have played an incredible role in her drawings. Her story really resonated with me, and that’s how I started to put the pieces together for the Atlas of the Sea project.

Elisa Kim, Ghosts in Water: Atlas of the Sea c.2018, 2018. Exhibition: TIME SPACE EXISTENCE, European Cultural Center 2018 Architectural Biennale, Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy, 2018. Photo: Patricia Parinejad.

MILLER: That project includes an exhibition called Ghosts in Water: Atlas of the Sea, which documents territories on the ocean floor claimed by nations under Article 76 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, adopted in 1982. What was the impetus for the project?

KIM: In 2016, I was co-teaching a series of architectural studios in Florence, Italy. This was at the height of Europe’s so-called migration crisis, and we were working with students on projects about migration. When I came across Article 76, I was shocked to learn that there are a set of borders that we don’t see or even know about. Almost immediately, I began trying to map these territories. I felt like I needed to see in totality their scale and consequences.

Each shape in the installation is a mirrored icon of a territory that’s been claimed by one state. Moving from left to right, they’re arranged chronologically in rows, beginning with the first claim made by Russia in 1990. I was interested in playing with the hard lines that are carving up the ocean floor, fracturing the space we used to think of as shared. I was also thinking about the materiality of the water. I wanted to provide a way that people can somehow enter that space, which was why I chose a mirrored material. I wanted you to feel like you were occupying that territory.

MILLER: Historically, international law has defined the sea as a commons—or at least open to all nations for trading purposes. What laid the groundwork for this recent territorialization?

KIM: Since antiquity, different ideologies have influenced how cultures conceive of the sea, whether as a space outside society, or a space to be territorialized, or a space of connection. Historically, across cultures, the idea of the sea as a commons has varied to some degree. Article 76 essentially allows nation-states to make sovereign claims to the ocean floor. These are not necessarily claims of sovereign ownership, but claims to sovereign action or activities related to extraction. Under Article 76, states can make a claim if they can prove that the area of the ocean floor they’re claiming is part of their continental shelf. Though the developments that have emerged might seem dramatic, in some ways, we shouldn’t be surprised to see nations making these kinds of claims.

MILLER: Your project points out that many of the claims are contested, as multiple states claim overlapping areas. How does the UN adjudicate the claims?

KIM: It’s a very slow-moving process. While eighty-odd claims have been made since 1990, only about twenty of them have been reviewed by the UN and accepted or denied. The process is quite opaque. The UN states that the reason it’s facilitating these claims is for the purposes of resource extraction. We’re talking about mining—mostly heavy metals and other types of minerals. Though the UN requires states to prove that their claim is part of the continental shelf, the consensus in scientific communities is that the documentation processes do not fully align with that criteria. The claims are being made by states or on behalf of states, but in a lot of cases, the states are working with industry to figure out where the mineral-rich areas are and how to extract the minerals. The other interesting thing to me is that patterns of colonization are being repeated. States that can’t afford the technologies necessary to make a claim need to partner with another state, so you see formerly colonized states “partnering” with imperial states.

MILLER: The work you’re doing suggests that mapmaking can hold the state accountable or insist on transparency in the state-making apparatus.

KIM: I have a sense that there’s a lot of secrecy surrounding Article 76 and the way it’s being adjudicated. All of the data and the maps, including latitudes and longitudes that delineate a bounded area, are technically available to the public online. But the PDFs have all been secured or rasterized, such that you can’t really zoom into the maps or copy and paste the geopoints into a GIS or other mapping software. It’s impossible for anyone to replicate the maps without manually inputting millions of geopoints. To map the first seventy-six claims, it took me two years, working with two research assistants.

MILLER: How do you think about your role as you make images that challenge these secured systems?

KIM: I’m interested in how I might appropriate the state’s techniques of formal mapping to make my own maps as alternatives to those used by government or as part of a broader strategy of advocacy. There are physical as well as cultural and mythological veils that keep us from thinking about the ocean floor; territorialization of that space has moved forward at an alarming pace, and we have no idea it’s happening. I’m interested in how I can use the mapping tools being used to fracture the ocean floor to make those fragments visible and legible. It’s really helpful for me to think about my work in the context of counter-mapping, which is a term used most often in geography. Counter-mapping started as a way for indigenous people to represent their land, territory, home, or space in a way that somehow destabilizes or questions the Western colonial mapping project. It’s a little different from what I’m doing because those methods of representation are, in most cases, not the planimetric view. I do often employ a plan-based view, but with the intention of destabilizing it by making it public.

I’m equally interested in pushing my work into a realm that’s less reliant on the Western traditions of mapping. In my current project, I’m trying to look at space vertically and in sections as opposed to in plan. I’m interested in how shifting our perspective about what we consider to be a map, in terms of which plane we’re looking at, allows us to tell different stories about that space.

MILLER: A planimetric map renders space as if seen from directly above. How does this aerial view conflict with the stories you’re interested in telling?

KIM: The conflict for me lies in a couple different attitudes. First, Western map making is a result of the imperial cartography of European colonizers, so our ideas about mapping and territorialization and border regimes are steeped in a controversial history that we have to be aware of, especially as we’re replicating these drawings.

Second, I’m interested in reading, understanding, and constructing space as a volumetric proposition. This is how architects view space. Looking at something in two dimensions or in plan excludes many possibilities for that space. One way to address that concern is to work in both plan and section, which means that we look at a two-dimensional slice of space from a vertical or perpendicular, rather than parallel, viewpoint relative to the ground, as most maps do. Working that way provides some alternatives to the plan drawing.

MILLER: How do you incorporate this approach in your own work?

KIM: Hydrographia (2017) was my first attempt to capture multiple stratifications of space within the water column. I overlaid different plans on top of each other, with information from the ocean floor and the ocean’s surface, as a way of bounding the space between and also trying to demonstrate that what’s happening at the surface is quite different from what’s happening below. In my current drawings for A Maritime Case Study for the Republic of Namibia, I’m working through sections. I’m trying to evoke a liquid quality and texture as a way of imagining what these spaces might feel like, through the use of serial sections of the ocean floor, so you’re getting both an evocative, ambient drawing while maintaining a set of precise information. We know that maps are never purely objective, so I’m interested in mapping not just as a quantitative exercise, but as a qualitative experience.

Elisa Kim, Hydrographia--Plate 23/32, 2017.

MILLER: How do these new drawings relate to the Atlas of the Sea?

KIM: You could think about this project as a kind of Atlas of the Sea, Part Two. I’m looking more carefully at the territories being claimed on the ocean floor, including one site in Kiribati in Micronesia and one in Namibia. Namibia has a lot of diamond mines within its territorial boundaries. A large percentage of the country’s GDP relies on the extraction of diamonds from terrestrial mines, but the mines are set to exhaust the diamond yields by 2050. Namibia’s rivers have carried a lot of diamonds out to sea, creating a whole new source of diamonds within their continental shelf, which the country has claimed through Article 76. From an economic, environmental, and sustainable perspective, it’s a really complicated situation, because Namibia relies on these diamonds as a resource, while, on the other hand, there are concerns about marine life and safety. There are also interesting political components to this story. The Namibian government has partnered with the De Beers Group to create their own corporation, [Namdeb], and they’re working in partnership with industry to mine these diamonds. This is an interesting case study that foreshadows some of the maritime territorial activities that we expect to see elsewhere. In that particular drawing, I’ve overlaid or stacked about 500 serial sections that cut through the territory that Namibia has claimed on the ocean floor. They provide a somewhat- accurate rendering, but also a dreamscape of what this underwater territory could be like.

MILLER: This raises questions for me about the role of water in determining ownership. In North America, you can find diamonds in Indiana that were moved from Quebec by a glacier thousands of years ago. When water transports these resources, who can claim them?

KIM: What you’re saying gets at the heart of the work of territorializing the ocean. Everything in the ocean is constantly moving—from the water to sea life, to tectonic plates—and this constant motion shifts the way that matter in this space might relate to ideas of ownership. Maps can bring these things into question, as they articulate different types of border regimes and juridical territories, including zones for air rights development, exclusive economic zones, or search and rescue zones that come into play in the case of a migration event. The map is a tool, and these multiple types of borders can be used in strategic ways for multiple agendas. In most cases, maps are being deployed to further the agendas of the state.

Atlas of the Sea

Object

Body of Water

About the Artist

Underwater New York is a platform for writing, art, and music inspired by the waterways of New York City.