How to buy/own/mint one millilitre of the ocean from the South China Sea? Our on-going experimental project titled Forkonomy() is guided by such a speculative question that takes the figurative and pirated material— the South China Sea (Mandarin: 南海, Nan Hai)— as our object of study. The northest Austronesians in Taiwan, the Tankas (Mandarin: 蜑家, Dang-Chia) in Hong Kong and many ocean peoples have viewed the world as “a sea of islands” rather than “places along the continent”, which reveals the fact that the sea is home to explore and to make world.

Despite the fact that Nan Hai is one of the world’s most heavily trafficked waterways for international trade, it is also one of the most disputable sea areas in the world over the territorial claims, spanning across Brunei, China, Malaysia, Taiwan, The Philippines and Vietnam. In addition, multiple Asian governments assert sovereignty over rocks, reefs, as well as other geographic features and undersea natural resources. This oceanic object is highly tangible and material, and yet significantly economical, military and political. If boundaries were not dotted lines on a map to compete for colonial power, but to think about them as making and maintaining kin relations to respect one another, including traditions and histories, then how might we queer the South China Sea otherwise?

The workshop and the exhibition emphasises the relating ecological and economical responsibility of the South China Sea, imagining ways of queering and expressing love to the ocean collectively and building solidarities beyond, and across, boundaries. The first and second versions of Forkonomy(), in Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (2020) and Solid Art (2021) respectively, gathered diverse participants, including policymakers, scholars, Marine life conservators, cultural workers, artists and activists, to queering the ownership of the one millilitre of Nan Hai through discussion, auction, contract making, NFT transaction, as well as code performance. The third and fourth versions in Seoul, South Korea (2022) and Graz, Austria (2023) will build upon the previous socially-engaged and participatory approaches to further discuss the politics and decentralized ownership of the ocean as a form of attending to struggles and building solidarities.

In the project Forkonomy(), we are interested in rethinking the politics of our contemporary economic and technical-cultural systems. By employing free and open source software and decentralized protocols, we set the participatory project as a commoning ship for people of the pacific who want to queer and care the matters of hierarchies, ownership, gendered labour division, as well as to fight against the constant threats of maintaining a high degree of autonomy regarding the land and the sea.