Terminal Island

TERMINAL ISLAND IS AN ARTIFICIAL landmass in the heart of the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, and was the subject of an exhibit at the CLUI Los Angeles from March 31 to May 30th, 2005. The exhibit looked at Terminal Island as a sort of organismic, flowing, landscape machine, composed of five separate terminal activities that occur on the island: importation, exportation, excretion, deportation and expulsion. Each one of these activities was described in text, and depicted through video captured by CLUI personnel over the months prior to the exhibit. This landscape machine churns and disgorges wastes in its treatment plant, and grinds up metals in its scrap yards. Fluids course through pipelines under its skin, while ships of crude pump in to it, and suck out of it. Its extremities are a bouquet of dead ends, of society pushed to the limits, with prisons, coast guards, piers and ground up riprap. As the center of the largest port in the Americas, the nation’s economy flows across its thousands of acres of asphalt, in the form of digitized cubes of material trade, in twenty and forty foot equivalences. It was for this, more than anything, that the island grew out of the ocean, an extension of the continental reach towards the orient. Its scale is beyond sensation by the senses, and its functions exceed the imaginations of our daily lives. Terminal Island is like a fictional place, made real by the collective will of America. The exhibit was made possible by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and the CLUI Fund for the Study of Islands and Distant American Landmasses. A bus and boat tour were also conducted as part of this exhibit. READ ABOUT THE TERMINAL ISLAND TOUR Source: Centre for Land Use Interpretation

The Inujima Rehabilitation Art Project on the island of Inujima, Japan

Inujima ("Dog Island") is a Japanese island in the Seto Inland Sea, located near the coast of Okayama Prefecture. As of 2005, Inujima has a population of 72. A ferry service operates between Hōden and Inujima. A copper refinery was opened on the island in 1909, but this closed in 1919.[2] The brick-built refinery remained largely undemolished, and from 2008, it formed the centrepiece of a large-scale art project designed to stimulate tourism to the island. The Inujima Art Project is a rehabilitation project covering the entire island by the Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation, a project of Benesse Corporation. It opened to the public in April 2008. The first phase of the project was to turn the old seirensho refinery into a model of contemporary architecture and art to recycle the Japanese industrial heritage. It was the coordinated efforts of the architect Hiroshi Sambuichi and Yukinori Yanagi who collaborated with the architect in his artwork, and the Faculty of Environmental Science and Technology at Okayama University.

Nauru government runs out of money and may shut services (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

By finance reporter Elysse Morgan and staff Updated 26 Sep 2014, 10:28pm Nauru's finance minister says the country is out of money and services will soon start shutting down, including those for refugees. Two years ago a court ruled that Nauru owed $16 million to a US-based fund manager, Firebird. It refused to pay and that debt has grown to $30 million. The government's bank accounts with Westpac have now been frozen, leaving it with only the cash it had on the island. Nauru is seeking to overturn the decision and urgently free up the funds. Nauru's government says it has had to fly its employees offshore with cash to pay overseas suppliers. In an affidavit, the country's finance minister David Adeang told the NSW Supreme Court that the island would shortly run out of cash, after making its latest round of government salary payments this week. The minister says Nauru will not be able to make any further salary payments, which will affect almost half of Nauru's population who are employed by the government, and have a large flow on impact to the island's tiny economy. Nauru would also have no money to buy fuel for generators, affecting the hospital and desalination plant. The minister says planes would be grounded, meaning Nauru will not be able to transport health, legal and other contractors to the detention centre, which he says will have a severe impact on the physical and mental health of the approximately 1,200 refugees living there, plus 200 more living in the community. However, a Nauru government spokesperson says no services have yet been affected. The court case starts on Monday.