This project interrogates the legal and spatial assumptions underlying sovereignty, proposing alternative cartographies that serve as evidence of continuity beyond the collapse of visible territory. It challenges the colonial logic of surface-based jurisdiction, where sovereignty is tied to fixed baselines and measurable coordinates, rendering submerged states legally silent. Against this framework, the project advances an evidentiary cartography, where maps are not representations but archives of relation. A rotating star compass overlays ancestral navigation systems with climate data, revealing distortions between cultural memory and environmental transformation. These misalignments are not errors but exposures, proof of epistemic friction between oral geographies and static legal codes. A fabric map further extends this approach, stitching coral ecosystems, clan geographies, and submerged histories into a spatial archive. Each thread is a juridical claim, and each route is a narrative of persistence. The project proposes a speculative amendment to UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea), advocating for recognizing submerged states, cultural waters, and mnemonic jurisdictions. Here, sovereignty is not written in land but remembered across waves, proven not by surface, but by continuity. The map becomes a legal instrument, an archive of survival.
