Station D: Deception Island

I often dream of islands, a remote space where life can always start over, a possibility of escape, a monad structured on a semi-divine notion of individual agency. For to dream of islands is to dream of the utopias they embody, and all their irresistible literary projections of an earthly paradise; but it’s also waking up to all its idyll impossibility.

In the book ‘Desert Islands’, Deleuze anticipates a theoretical position on islands in geographical terms, arguing that they are never really separated from the rest of the earth: a continental island is an extension of a larger landmass; an oceanic island arises from the geological depths to break the surface of the water.

These geo-oceanic dynamics tell us that the same conditions that make the island possible also make impossible its transcendent purpose, or its desert condition by radical separation. The island is therefore a space of perpetual transformation, the result of the struggle between sea and land, space from which it cannot really be said to exist (to be), only that it is immersed in a tireless process of entering and leaving existence (becoming).

It is this idea of territories existing as a liminal space, or as a non-objective reality – that I am interested in exploring because if limits and concreteness define the nature of the nation-state, a portable, transformable and manufactured territory, confronts it.