Taipei, Taiwan, MOCA 2006-2007
“Freedom is no tea party, India. Freedom is a war.”
Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown.
“In June 2006 YKON was asked by a Taiwan based organization to approach a number of Micronations and Microstates in order to explore the possibilities of a formal recognition of the sovereignty and independence of Taiwan by those entities. YKON contacted more than 50 Micronations all over the world, out of whom 10 are willing to grant recognition to Taiwan.
The citizens of Taiwan are invited to sign a petition to support the mutual recognition between Micronations and Taiwan.
YKON is a non-profit advocacy group for unrepresented nations, experimental countries and utopian thinkers.”
This text you will be able to read on a wall in the MOCA museum in Taipei in december 2006. It is part of YKONs project Recognize Me, a conceptually oriented experiment that consists of little more than the Micronations recognition of Taiwan. It is an exercise of dispositive power through collective recognition. YKON will be the agency that creates the space of negotiation and will document the process.
Along two other walls in the same space the official letters from the Ten Micronations proposing recognition of Taiwan are presented. Here you can read the proposals and the conditions by the Microstates, for example:
“The Cabinet of Ladonia is positive to recognize Taiwan. But for doing this we have three conditions. 1. Taiwan should accept that Ladonian Air Force, Army and Navy will protect Taiwan against China. 2. King Ladon’s artificial comet is released on the 27th of October every year. This day is a holyday in Ladonia and it should also be a holiday in Taiwan (it is not necessary that people have a day off from their works). /…/”
or
“1. No Molossia does not recognize Taiwan. It was my understanding that such recognition would be reciprocal; when Taiwan recognizes Molossia,
Molossia will do the same.”
or
“The official view of the gay government and the gay community is that
ROC is the independent state of Taiwan the Kingdom also recognise the
independence of Tibet. Both Tibet and Taiwan are not only recognised
by our government as sovereign states but by all the gay communities
appropriate committees and decisions making bodies.”
or
“While I’m sure the government of Taiwan is used to greater formality than this, all they need to do to have their nation recognised by TTF-Bucksfan,
is simply to have a qualified professional, preferably a professional member of government like a Minister, fill-out the application at the Micronational
Professional Registry (MPR). All they need to do is send a highly qualified person to the Web site below, and have him/her fill-out the online form, and in place of the Nation/Micronation they only need to specify “Taiwan” (they
must also add “Taiwan” as the Country of Residence):
http://mpr.cyberterra.com “
Ladonia, The Gay & Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands, Westarctica, Snake Hill, Kingdoms of Elgaland and Vargaland… and so on: the world of Micronations speaks with many voices, it is a sum of individual histories. “A multinational mix of oddballs, eccentrics and visionaries”, the Lonely planets guide Micronations; The Lonely Planet Guide to Home-Made Nations teaches us. What does a recognition from such a group of unrecognized entities mean? For them? For Taiwan? For the world at large?
With all their usual humour and invention the Micronations here take a trip into the real world. However Recognise Me is not the exhibit of an achieved Utopian construct, but rather the story of its production and the very process of construction as such. The narratives told by the recognitions in “Recognize Me” seek to make the audience enter actual experiences: of individuals- micro-nations and utopias. trying to find a way in the modern world. Pluralisms are the answer to repressive unities and identities of all kinds. In the future there will not be one community existing and one kind of life led in Utopia.
“But seriously”, you might want to ask us, “Do you know what, or who you are dealing with?
Freedom is no tea party, YKON. And this is Taiwan and China you are dealing with.
- Taiwan and CHINA!”
And this is of course true. YKON does not have the normal requirements for authority, weapons of mass-destruction, or economic sanctions, “- hey we do not even enjoy diplomatic immunity?!” So the whole enterprise of creating the space of negotiation seems quite idiotic, to say the least.
But then again,
“Is this not after all an art project?” Why use this serious tone, when we are talking only of an art project? No one will take it seriously anyway? And this is of course also partly true. And we are not only dealing with the not so serious Art, but also the Micronations, remember “A multinational mix of oddballs, eccentrics and visionaries”?
In Recognize Me, we at YKON, have on the one side of the table voices like Bengt Johanssons “Kina-Taiwan: risk för krig eller chans till fred (2006)” (China-Taiwan: risk for war or a chance for peace), or James Crawford (Whewell Professor of International Law, University of Cambridge), serious voices telling us “Freedom is no Tea party. Freedom is a War”. On the other side of the table we have the Micronations: unique but according to most “perhaps a little wacky”. When YKON accepted the task to start the negotiations it did it for various reasons, and many of these reasons resonate with the reasons people create their own nations. Some are theoretical experiments in statehood, others are played mostly for laughs, other search for alternatives to a world that is ultimately shaped by brute force and economic interest.
So where should the recognition of Taiwan by the Micronations be put: in the wacky or the serious compartment? Well why not the Freedom compartement? Because what YKON actually does in Recognize Me is create a space of negotiation, where both of these voices meet and… Who knows? In the end we might have a mutual recognition? Maybe Freedom does not have to be a War?