This was firstly published on Site-Writing, edited by Jane Rendell.

Poetic Water Boundaries is a project that imagines a possible borderless sea. The book binds together the legal text of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea with found and made materials, a series of poetic water boundaries questioning the construction and legitimization of borders and boundaries in the fluctuating waters of the seas through laws, through lines, through land.

Situated at the national border between the UK and Denmark, a one-kilometre-long stretch in the North Sea, through the form of the riddle, Poetic Water Boundaries questions where this border physically is, why it is there and not somewhere else, and what this shared line and its surrounding body/bodies of water could become. A riddle is a statement or question put forward as something to solve, something inherently complex and difficult to understand, questioning established orders, showing that things are not necessarily stable, but rather indefinable and in flux, moving and flowing.

Anna Livia Vørsel

References

Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

Elli Köngäs Maranda, ‘Riddles and Riddling: An Introduction,’ The Journal of American Folklore, Riddles and Riddling, v. 89, n. 352, (April–June 1976), pp. 127–37.