How to start your own country: five ways to begin today. It could be tongue-in-cheek, a sort of wordplay that dismisses the proliferation of modern manuals such as “how to start a business when you’re still a student“, “the five steps to success” or even “how to be a Buddhist millionaire“. All these titles are true; should the reader be interested; the guides do indeed exist. Erwin S. Strauss wrote the first one in 1979, a libertarian book “dedicated to all new country organisers of the world – past, present and future” [1]. Hoping that the 80s would be a Golden Age for the outbreak of new nations, the author – a fan, like me, of sci-fi – questions the conceptual inflexibility that persuades us that the here-and-now is the only real and feasible world, a supporter – not like me – of the idea that the separatist drive is a human element in its social and (supposedly) essentially conflictual dynamics.

This approach is controversial and calls for more reflection than this brief article can provide. The research on micronations by Lisbon-based Tasmanian artist James Newitt, by way of example, has been underway for 10 years. Like other projects by the multimedia, multi-award-winning art-maker, it deepens and widens over a long period of intellectual engagement, in which all the complexities and paradoxes of a particular socio-cultural-environmental configuration are played out. In Haven, at Galeria da Boavista – a sort of second iteration of the installation work that he presented, in 2021, at the Porto Photography Biennial -, he exhibits part of his research on the Principality of Sealand, an entity that claims for itself, rather than the Vatican, the title of “the world’s smallest state”. Lying to the south-east of England, bathed by the North Sea, the country’s territory boils down to a large British naval base built during the Second World War and occupied by Roy Bates, a pirate radio station operator and Sealand’s founder. Thence ensues an epic nicely chronicled on the government’s official website, boasting of its egalitarian sports clubs, commitment to sustainability and horizontality, and failed venture to become a “data haven” “without the draconian censorship restrictions imposed by other nations” [2].

Whether coincidental or destined to be, I started writing this text on my way to Gotland, Sweden’s largest island, encircled by the Baltic – Sealand’s neighbouring ocean. It takes about three hours to travel from Stockholm: three hours rocking along the sea, three hours seasick, three hours with the never-ending, mystical view of a blue, rippling horizon. I blink my eyes and oddly manage to spot the waters made of pixels that James Newitt fixates on in Untitled (fire) (2022), Untitled (tower) (2023) or the audiovisual installation HAVEN (2023). I am suddenly no longer encapsulated by an organic, liquid enormity, but by a virtual cosmos, a sort of cybernetic reality whose sharpness depends on the Internet speed, prone to glitches and buffering. I can only think that the visionary effort to turn the seabed into an unregulated den of information – as well as a ground for new aquatic utopias or floating start-up communities, to quote the curator Mattia Tosti in the exhibition’s text [3] – depends on this speculative and material (perhaps too simplistic, or merely legalistic) transmutation of the oceans into “no man’s land”. I peer out of the window and grapple with the absurdity of this idea: I do indeed see a great, quasi-stable vacuum from here; I nevertheless sail above at least 50 metres of uncountable lives, marine ecosystems, transient memories and plastic. How much do we have to vainly overlook or ignore to make this inscrutable, unknown sea a conquerable object?

Undeterred by the colonialist overtones of this initiative, Newitt thoughtfully and carefully brings all these questions on board the gallery, whose architecture shifts to reflect the servers and corridors of a data centre. In dealing with the intimacy of the Sealand royal family – and then the image of the tower -, the artist keeps a certain distance, privacy and mystery, opting to intervene graphically on the archive photos and even to digitally reconstruct the areas. In a way, his aesthetic (but above all ethical) choices also reflect a lonely research process, which sought never-materialised encounters and never-answered correspondences (HAVEN (archive), 2023): how to draw a portrait of what we have never seen? This is where the brilliant breakthrough of Newitt’s artistic proposal comes in: by upsetting the accuracy of his own Sealand depictions, he also makes us question the reality, or concreteness, of this country-project. Glazed studies, vague act enquiries and the imagination of a fictional site to occupy and devise: this is how we can describe Sealand, an insular and isolated territory, littered with dreams that are rusting away and drowning narratives. Through its subject and method, Haven reminds us that, today and for all time, utopias will not suffice on their own: fantasising new peaks for the world will only make sense if made collectively and critically.

Haven is on show at Galeria da Boavista, Lisbon, until September 17, 2023.

[1] Strauss, Erwin S. (1979). How to Start Your Own Country. Colorado: Paladin Press.

[2] Available in <https://sealandgov.org/en-eu/pages/the-story>. Tradução livre.

[3] Available in <https://galeriasmunicipais.pt/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/GM_Boavista_Haven_print_pt-1.pdf>.