[Image: The Bibby Renaissance, via Is this the first prison ship?]

Googleized

stares sideways into infinity

[Image: The Warrior, prison hulk.]

Wikipedia

one of the longest and most detailed accounts of life on a prison hulk

when trade in human beings was lucrative and respectable.

[Image: The HMS Prison Ship 'Jersey'. (via Diacritic).]

[Image: The USS Bataan.]

“The pride of the Chilean Navy, the Esmeralda, might be a magnificent example of marine architecture, but it has skeletons in its closet. To thousands of Chileans, the ship is a symbol of the country's brutal past.



In the weeks after General Augusto Pinochet's bloody coup in 1973, the Esmeralda was used as a floating prison and torture chamber.”



“Reports from Amnesty International, the US Senate and Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission describe the ship as a kind of a floating jail-torture chamber for political prisoners of the Augusto Pinochet's military regime from 1973 to 1980. It is claimed that probably over a hundred persons were kept there at times and subjected to hideous treatment.[1]” - Wikipedia

[Image: If you can get your hands on it, a documentary film was made about The Dark Side of the White Lady (official film website).]

Cap Arcona

Cap Arcona

[Image: Terminal Air is a project that explores complex interconnections between government agencies and private contractors involved with the United States Central Intelligence Agency's extraordinary rendition program.]

[Image: Bibby Renaissance (via).]

[Image: Nauru Island, South Asia. An Australian Refugee detention island.]

[Image: Riker's Island, New York. An American prison.]

“Worlds and empires shelter and fatten offshore, dropping into protected enclaves, free economic zones, and paper sovereignties long enough to avoid taxes, engage inexpensive labor, or launder an identity. Streamlined logistics and loosened legalities are among the bullet-pointed features of every logistics park and free economic zone in the world. Their segregation from other worlds and other nations helps them to garner power, and shapes them into distended and dominating territories that are constantly expanding and excluding. They are the world with their own seas.”



“In Jacques Ranciere’s speculations, the sea is a medium of insurgency and democracy. Ranciere’s sea is not a frictionless sea but, rather, a rough space of contention: “It smells of sailors.” The sea is capable of enriching and disrupting the landed politics of consensus. Once on a shore, political organs dilute the sea’s raw democracy, as if secretly wishing for the end of politics or a delivery from the sea’s unknowns. Land and sea again appear to be a pair, or two halves of a single world. Yet the site of this contemplation is the shore, the interface between raw democracy and political organization. Wherever that interface exists, there is a platform for which to counter what Carl Schmitt called the “shoreless sea” of legal exception. In Ranciere’s characterization, this slipstream is not a space of least resistance but, rather, a space of traction and contention.”



“like shores, these areas of intolerance between worlds sustain and are sustained by error piracy, or the contentions of democracy. As interfaces between worlds, they form a perpetual wilderness with limitless surface area – always newly minted, and often underexplored. However rough they may be, these seas are also spacious, mixing different waters and different political constitutions.”

[Image: Alcatraz Prison, San Francisco, California.]

incarceralized