The Sealand chapter of Uncorporate Identity examines the Principality of Sealand as a case study in how statehood and identity can be constituted through external infrastructures rather than political or territorial fact.

Situated on a disused sea fort, Sealand lacks formal recognition, governance, and territorial legitimacy, yet it presents itself as a sovereign state through flags, passports, stamps, and online narratives. By analyzing how Sealand’s identity is mediated by interfaces and collective imagination, Metahaven reveals the mechanics of recognition and the performative nature of sovereignty in a networked era.

I therefore attempt to frame Sealand through the language of metadata rather than narrative. Using a retro OS interface, each conceptual element in the reading is treated as a discrete file, mirroring how Sealand’s identity exists through external infrastructures like search results and documentation. The interface becomes the ‘outside’ that gives form to an otherwise empty state.

References:

Velden, D. van der and Kruk, V. (2009) Uncorporate Identity. Baden: Lars Müller Publishers; Springer (distributor), pp. 19–49.

St George’s Gardens is an unassuming park that sits at the crossroads of Greys Inn Road, Sidmouth Street, and Handel Street. It is in a constant state of flux; brisk walkers cut through it, dogs sniff their way around, birds and insects animate the air.

It is also a cemetery.

This duality unsettled me at first, so much so that I would hold my breath walking past the gravestones, willing myself to ignore their existence. As I began to investigate the gardens through drawing, however, I found that this space invited a slower, more porous way of seeing.

I tried in my process to mirror Georges Perec’s approach to observation. In ‘The Street,’ Perec (1997) proposes a method of inquiry rooted in attention to the seemingly banal, things we often overlook precisely because they are always there. “Carry on [classifying] / Until the scene becomes improbable,” he writes, “until you have the impression, for the briefest of moments, that you are in a strange town or, better still, until you can no longer understand what is happening or is not happening” (p. 53).

My own investigation followed this principle: by drawing and redrawing textures: grass, bark, stone, flower, through different visual techniques (pixelation, hatching, gradient mesh, etc.), I began to notice what I had previously dismissed.

Grass, for example, became not just a backdrop, but a constant host to footfall, decay, and regrowth. Stone, once a marker of death, revealed itself to be alive with moss, weathering, and time: a surface of accumulation, rather than absence.

Through drawing, I realised that these were not just static materials, but living surfaces, each carrying their own entanglements with the environment.

My voice throughout this process has been observational, much like Agnès Varda’s in The Gleaners and I (2000).

Varda wanders and collects, lingering on the discarded and the overlooked with intimacy and curiosity. My project shares this ethos. Rather than the obvious connotations of death associated with a cemetery, I focused on what is alive now: a weed cracking through pavement, a bloom softening a gravestone, the way bark sheds and renews.

In doing so, I reframed the cemetery not as a static space of remembrance, but as a living ecosystem in flux. My project became a culmination of that shift in perspective, and ultimately, a record of how perception can be changed by the act of looking more closely.