Governance: Documents & Monuments

Abstract

“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” —Walter Benjamin

The island nation of Matla, as any statutorily political and physically real place, exists in the relations and transformations of documents and monuments. It is a reality of written inscriptions and physical places, in resonance. National and physical infrastructures require traceable regulations, policies, agreements and decisions—reams of documents that originate, validate and catalogue terrains, construction and operation. Policy, agreements, letters of agreement and legislation serve to instantiate and defend physical cultural sovereignties and borderlands, these also becoming historical monuments changes wrought to lands and peoples. Legal and governmental procedures and decrees, abstracted and composed at distance from their sites of application, materially change how and where material goods human and non-human bodies are able to move.

Islands are bodies in the making, worlds of flows, connections and liquidities. The Maltese archipelago is geopolitical and geophysical infrastructure, a place where security, value and identity are wrought through transport, transfer and movement. The documents and monuments that regulate this process are the subject of this workshop, noting that it is amongst the central tenets of capital flow in our contemporary age that materials — raw, commodity, consumable — are much more “free” than are people. If we characterise freedom in part through the ability to move around, it is apparent that “free trade” means it is easier for a Walmart T-shirt sewn in Asia to move across borders than it is for the human labourers who made it to do the same. This is all explicitly enabled by real infrastructures like the Belt and Road Initiative, a global development philosophy and infrastructure project being undertaken by the Chinese government, which involves development investments in 152 countries.

The relation of documents and monuments that allows for migrations of materials and peoples will be explored in this workshop. We will trace the migratory effects of specific documents (historical and contemporary policies, agreements, contracts, and laybills) on linked sites, industrial and infrastructural objects and installations, regions and landscapes) as resulting in and stemming from monuments (specific sites, industrial and infrastructural objects and installations, regions and landscapes). Maltese archipelago, and its relation to globalising initiatives like the Belt and Road, will attempt a bureaucratic forensics using data, field visits, and investigative tracing, visualization and storytelling.