statement towards a

Pulau G (Island G) is an
artificial island constructed
as part of an enormous
land reclamation project
on the north coast of Jakarta, Indonesia.
Due to various failures, its development as elite real estate is currently halted, leaving it as an awkward sandbank mostly visited by birds. It is bemoaned by local fishing communities for obstructing their passage out to sea, and by environmental groups, who want the sand of which it is made returned to Jakarta’s neighbouring regions.

In answer to spiraling debt and environmental turbulence, large real estate projects like the one intended for Island G are premised on high-risk, high-reward financial speculation. Foreign investors are lured with the promise of enormous capital gains, and local developers are lauded as good nationalists for turning environmental threat into opportunity. In a time of unprecedented climate catastrophe, Global North governments, multinational companies, neoliberal economists, blockchain nerds and tech-fetishists are advancing the virtuassslised spectacle of the ‘win-win solution’, promising to extend capital to places it has never reached before, and avert climate disaster in the process. This spectacle underpins the technologically enabled neo-colonialism of programs for carbon offsetting and trading, touching down violently in Indonesia via Reduced Emissions through Deforestation and Destruction (REDD+) projects, and the World Bank-sponsored One Map Initiative, which promises to make Indonesia’s territory uncomplicatedly legible to capital.

The highly speculative visions of urban development offered to investors, and advances in big tech such as cryptocurrencies, are the contemporary leading edge of capitalism’s global reproduction and expansion as a destructive and renegade system of organising nature and structuring social cooperation.

Having conducted two years of preliminary research on Jakarta Bay, our primary goals are now to reach out to tech sisters and Indonesian environmental justice activists using our connections and the Wasteland Twinning Network. We will continue to research the processes of rendering the earth’s ocean-land-atmosphere legible, exchangeable, commodifiable and enclosable through public/private (de)/centralised ledgers, Blockchain tech and the Indonesian government’s One Map Initiative. We want to share this research process with others and draw them into it.

We will begin to publish our research following a launch presentation at Daas KAPiTAL, in Berlin on Tuesday 17th of December, 2019.

Island G offers us a way to continue working together.
Island G offers a unique focal point to discuss intersections of our differing research interests including but not limited to: environmental piracy (for example DNA as extractable intellectual property), nationalism (for Arendt the ‘perversion of the state into an instrument of the nation’), virtualism, speculative real estate and its aesthetic-modeling, the critique of neoliberal capitalism, i.e. creative forms of corruption such as hijacking carbon offsetting to create forest-hostage scenarios, speculative ‘rootless’ or distributed network economies (Bitcoin, Envion, Ben & Jerry’s partnership with Poseidon) and more.
Island G is proposed as a vehicle with which to view global changes in how land is viewed and evaluated. As a wasteland, we will attempt to think with Island G in order to “[bridge] the disconnect between information-related struggles (from the hacker movement to the digital precariat, from Anonymous to media activism in the post–Edward Snowden age) and energy-related struggles (from antinuclear movements to climate justice, from urban ecology to indigenous struggles on land and sovereignty.” (Matteo Pasquinelli, The Automation of the Anthropocene).