The Glitch
The south cardinal buoy we’re focusing on was anchored out in open water when we first arrived. While it could hardly be seen with the naked eye during the day, its six short, one long light flashes in the evening made it sharply visible. We developed a daily practice of filming it during sunset and sunrise. A week after our arrival, following days of harsh weather, we woke up to find the buoy in an entirely different location. Our assumption was that it had dragged its anchor. We continued the project and our daily filming practice. Three days later, we got up at dusk as usual, filmed the buoy and moved on to other daily activities. To our astonishment, in midday, when we glanced back at the sea to look at the buoy, it was gone.
The disappearance of the buoy, as common in all infrastructural ruptures, activated a chain of events which made visible the human and more-than-human agents involved in the maintenance and continuous re-production of this technical object—as well as those that intervene into its operations. In the weeks that followed its disappearance, we tracked the buoy down and followed it through these chain of events.
The Accident
The International Association of Marine Aids to Navigation and Lighthouse Authorities (IALA) is an intergovernmental organization which, staring in the 1980s, developed a Marine Buoyage System which, today, serves as the most common maritime buoyage regulation adopted and practiced internationally. The most revealing moment in the development of this system is the Texaco Caribbean shipping accident which took place in the Strait of Dover in 1971. The Texaco Caribbean, a steamship oil tanker on its way from the Netherlands to Trinidad, was struck by the Paracas, a Peruvian freighter, on January 11. The Texaco Caribbean exploded, split in two and sank, spilling 600 tons of bunker fuel oil in the sea. The British coastal authorities, failing to find both sections of the tanker, marked only one half of the shipwreck. The following day, the Brandenburg, a West German freighter heading from Antwerp to Kingston, hit the unmarked half of the tanker and sank. A month later, on February 27, the Niki, a Greek motorship cargo on route from Dunkirk to Alexandria collided with the wrecks and sank with its entire crew. This was the event that triggered intergovernmental cooperation and collaboration to develop an internationally accepted system of maritime signs and traffic. The Marine Buoyage System thus emerged as an infrastructure that facilitated international trade, logistics and extraction—operations of the colonial logic.
International Infrastructure: Cartographic vision and the promise of navigational infrastructure
The Maritime Buoyage System categorizes maritime marks according to their meanings. It defines their placement, their surface colors, the signage they carry and their flashing lights’ rhythm and color.
The buoy we are focusing on is a south cardinal mark that indicates a hazard to the north of the buoy, on the seabed. The south cardinal mark is one of four cardinal marks which are all named, expectedly, after the four cardinal directions—north, south, east, west. Cardinal directions, determined by two lines that intersect each other perpendicularly, are abstract concepts that emerged from the logic of geometry which were then overlaid onto geography. They allow a grounded onlooker a cartographic—top down—vision. As such, cardinal marks are technical objects of the map which have materialized on the ground and their infrastructural promise, similar to that of mapping and bordering, is to maintain selective mobility and blockage. However, as demonstrated by the case of the south cardinal mark in Ayvalik, the stability of geometry is incompatible with the fluidity of geography and more-than-human assemblages which culminates in ruptures or glitches in its infrastructures. The movement of the buoy—either in small scale due to waves or in more extreme cases such as when its chain breaks—leads to blurriness in cartographic vision or a major doubling in its image. Nonetheless, any such intervention, through repetition, is integrated into the infrastructure through fail-safe mechanisms and contingency or risk management plans. Consequently, through a repeated process of intervention and maintenance, the technical object—and the infrastructure of which it is a part—differentiates either toward a planned imaginary or surpasses it and becomes an active agent in the development of a future plan.
Local Infrastructure: The State and the local human and more-than-human agents
The chain of events we followed after the disappearance of the buoy exposed such a mechanism which, within the local context of Ayvalik, drew in a wide range of local human and more-than-human actors. This provided us not only a chance to follow an inter-scalar approach in our investigation but it also led us to encounters which revealed material and narrative histories. This allowed us to sketch a site-specific spatiotemporal account of how an international agreement passes through national legislations and then materializes and embeds itself within a local context. Our account involves the flashing light of the buoy, its signal and marks, salt water, rust, mussels, waves, the coastguard, the Directorate General of Coastal Safety and the family of local lighthouse keepers.
Aslı Uludağ & Kerem Ozan Bayraktar
2021, Balikesir, Turkey
Interview