Media Release Further information on the Clipperton Project can be found at: Source: Oliver Basciano
February 2011
The Clipperton Project
7 international artists, 7 international scientists, 1 expedition to an
astonishing, abandoned island in the Pacific with a strange history and unique biosphere.
Situated around 800 miles west of Acapulco, Clipperton (or as the French style it, Ile de la Passion) is an abandoned island with a strange history, a unique biosphere and an obscure lagoon filled with ancient marine life. Later this year an expedition of 7 international artists and 7 international scientists will set sail from the West coast of Mexico on a 3-week expedition to the island. The participants will produce work based on the history of the atoll (specifically Mexico’s “damned” colony of 1917) and its ecological, geological and human history in order to create a cross-cultural portrayal of this unique place. The work produced will then be shown at scientific and cultural institutions across Europe and the Americas, including Glasgow Sculpture Studios (Glasgow, Scotland), Universum (Mexico City, Mexico) and Institute of the Americas (London, England).
Unveiling details of the project at Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Expedition Leader, Jonathan Bonfiglio, said:
“I’d heard about this strange island of Clipperton a few years ago and it soon became clear that it could offer a very interesting jumping off point for discussing many different topics of importance to contemporary society.”
“The idea of an international arts science expedition came about as offering a way to explore areas such as global warming and environmental issues through cross cultural dialogue. By linking these two broad areas of endeavour it would bring something new to the fore and hopefully reach new audiences.”
“There are so many aspects of Clipperton that are fascinating for me as an artist from its strange history to its unique biology,” says British sculptor, Charles Engebretsen, who is one of only seven international artists to be taking part in the expedition. “I have collaborated with many artists in different environments, but not had close interactions with scientists before,” he adds. “The opportunity to work with the oceanographers, biologists and medical scientists will inform my practice, and the chance to display the work we make in scientific establishments as well as art galleries is particularly exciting as it will hopefully break down the perceived barriers between art and science.”
“We are thrilled to be a partner in the Clipperton Project which will see the artists and scientists not only bring their unique perspectives to issues of importance to contemporary society, but enable some fruitful dialogues to be set up between the two fields,” says Amy Sales, Programme Development Manager at Glasgow Sculpture Studios. “We know that many of the participants already have some ideas about the topics of interest for their research, but we are sure other exciting things will emerge once the group arrives at the island which will lead to an important body of research and intriguing artworks to be shown across Europe and the Americas in 2012. “
The 7 artists taking part in the expedition are expedition leader, writer Jonathan Bonfiglio; Mexican photographer Naim “El Libanes” Rahal Manzanilla; Norwegian Dancer/choreographer, Mia Habib; British filmmaker, John Dickie; British designer/visual artist Nicola Dobrowolski; Mexican Writer, Jimena Gorráez Belmar and British Sculptor, Charles Engebretsen. The scientists taking part in the expedition are experts in the fields of Environmental Geoscience, Oceanography, Biomedicine Hydrogeology, Biology, Medical Investigation, Industrial Engineering, Molecular Biology and Genomics.
www.clippertonproject.com
ENDS
Notes for Editors
Clipperton (Ile de la Passion)
History
The island of Clipperton has had an incredible history, from rumours of hidden treasure left by the British pirate John Clipperton, to the struggles between Mexico and France over its ownership (including the horrific and tragic events there in 1917) in the early twentieth century to the little known fact that President Roosevelt visited there twice during the Second World War with a view to establishing it as a military base for the United States. Today Clipperton is a French territory and provides us with one of the most isolated ecosystems in the world, one which might reveal not only the extent of current climate change through study of its coral reefs but also a place in which a consistently invaded body of water in the lagoon somehow remains drinkable, a factor of major interest to participating scientists.
The Island
Apart from the forgotten Mexican colony that inhabited the island at the start of the last century, Clipperton has seen very few humans in its history, and even the small number who have recently visited have failed to provide wholly accurate documentation of what the island holds. Some accounts talk of the substantial problem provided by rats – now the apex predator on the island - left over from sinking ships; others describe the coral reefs around the atoll as making access to the island almost impossible; still others disagree about how long it takes to walk around the entire island (accounts vary from 2 to 7 hours).
All in all, this means that it is very difficult to know what will be found on arrival at the island, although little shelter and plenty of poisonous orange crabs are a certainty. Clipperton Island may look like paradise from a distance, but close up it is a unique hybrid of an ecosystem in which odd creatures have somehow managed to survive alone at the ends of the earth.
At an average height of 3 metres above sea level, with rising sea levels Clipperton Atoll will soon no longer exist. This is not just an island which will disappear forever, but all manner of highly evolved and unique bacteria, fungi and algae from the lagoon, and along with them all the genetic make-up which has allowed them to survive in such a hostile environment. It is estimated that only 10% of species on earth have been genetically documented, and species that inhabit the outer, more extreme reaches of the planet are more genetically unique than those found in the more common usual environments. This means that they must be studied now before that genetic information – a genetic information which harbours the strongest survival instincts and abilities at its core – is lost forever.
With the relatively new field of metagenomics, preservation of the genetic material allows the identification of biodiversity of microscopic species and of bioprospecting (which refers to the finding of new genes, enzymes and proteins). This is a field of massive growth and interest for universities, organisations and drug companies focusing on medical investigations, as these are currently leading to previously unthought breakthroughs in biotechnological and medical science.
The Coral Reefs
The oceans – the lungs of the earth - are becoming increasingly acidic, meaning that organisms within these vast fields of life are finding it harder and harder to reproduce and regenerate, thus radically altering what used to be a perfectly balanced ecosystem. The coral reefs around Clipperton were once pristine, and even though reports suggest that they have suffered from man’s influence – even here on one of the most isolated islands on earth – studies undertaken even in a few days will reveal how their capacity to regenerate has been affected by reduced ocean salinity.
The Lagoon
Despite regular saltwater incursions, Clipperton’s lagoon somehow remains freshwater and drinkable, and is therefore one of the most important centres of investigation for the Clipperton Project, which will be collecting samples from all areas and depths in the lagoon, with these being refrigerated and delivered to the Institutes of Biotechnology and Genomic Science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of Morelos, where the samples will be isolated, catalogued and studied.
Lesley Booth
New Century PR
Tel: +44 (0)141 649 9621/+ 44 (0)20 8677 6741
Mobile: +44 (0)779 941 4474
Recent/Current projects include:
Bard in the Botanics Festival; British Art Show 7 (Glasgow); Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland; Cultural Enterprise Office; Deveron Arts; Edinburgh Art Festival, Finefunds; Glasgow Sculpture Studios; Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich; Scottish Flute Trio; Scottish Youth Theatre; sound Festival of New Music; Stavanger - Cultural Capital of Europe; Vanishing Point Theatre Company; Y-dance.
The Clipperton Project
CNN Reporter Johnny Colt Visits Nauru: Little Island of Big Stories
Please join me in a series of iReports about a place that I hope you will find as fascinating as I do.
Let me introduce you to the island nation of Nauru, the world’s smallest independent sovereign Republic. When I say this raised, fossilized atoll is small, I mean small. This country boasts a population of roughly 10,500 people. Maximum. The manager of the country’s one television channel (NTV – Nauru Television) claims that most people in Nauru know everyone on the island. To get a real feel for how small Nauru is, let’s look at it this way: Nauru’s landmass is 21 square kilometers in total. If you drive at the island’s top speed of 25 mph, you can circle the island in about 20 minutes. When they say Nauru is remote, it is hours by plane to the next landmass of any real size. It took me two full days and four planes to reach Nauru from Atlanta.
If the world were flat, the last stop before you fell off would be Nauru. Equal parts Pacific beauty, gritty industrial complex, native people in no hurry and Ian Fleming-style mystery all add up to create a story you just couldn’t make up. The cast of characters I met on this remote island are the stuff of timeless novels.
Nauru is infamous on the world stage. The country has been at the center of much controversy. Offshore banking scandals; supposedly, the world’s highest obesity rates per capita; the site of a controversial detention center for Australia’s unwanted asylum-seekers and let’s not forget the U.S.-led Operation Weasel. Operation Weasel, you ask? That operation was a program where the U.S. Government paid Nauru to use the Nauruan Embassy in North Korea to help smuggle out defecting North Korean scientists. Does that come with one of those James Bond gadgets, like a fountain pen that shoots lethal darts?
Nauru, however, is best known for phosphate. After World War I, Britain, Australia and New Zealand administered Nauru. For six decades, Nauru’s foreign administers strip-mined the island–taking the phosphate and leaving two-thirds of the island uninhabitable. Found guilty for devastating the land through inappropriate mining, Nauru’s administrators had to turn over the keys to the phosphate ATM as well as give Nauru its independence in 1968. The Nauruans continued to mine the island as their predecessors had done. The phosphate boom continued and briefly made the islanders the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The phosphate mining eventually slowed down. According to Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, phosphate production went from 1.67 million tons in the late 1980‘s to having ceased, altogether, by 2003. Phosphate production is currently up and running, again, as I would soon see for myself. But, I am getting ahead of the story. Out of control spending, bad investments and outright theft left Nauru destitute. Nauru fought to have it all, only to lose everything they earned in one generation. It is a remarkable story of excess, corruption, international manipulation and a community of natives coming of age. An island gold rush for a mineral principally used as fertilizer. In all my research about Nauru, I only found two quotes from actual Nauruans (that were not politicians.) Why do we hear so little in these reports from the everyday Nauruans? So much has been said about this notorious country–most of it negative. Some of that press is so negative that it feels a little like journalistic bullies picking on a school kid of a story. Information about Nauru is difficult to get. From a statistics standpoint, small populations can be tricky to track correctly. Because of these issues, reporting on Nauru is suspect to questionable sourcing. The basic theme of most reporting on Nauru is as follows: The island, after using up its resources and income, is now a hard luck case living on government handouts. Australia will spend 26.6 million dollars worth of aid to Nauru in 2010-2011. Sounds hard luck to me. I can not help thinking that, on the other hand, had the country’s original Aussie administrators rehabbed the land as they mined it in the first place, maybe they wouldn’t be writing all these checks, today.
While researching Nauru’s crazy history, I found something that–for me–painted a very different picture of the islanders’ character than I was being told in my “off the record phone calls” with Australian officials. During World War II, the Japanese occupied Nauru. It is well documented how brutal the Japanese military were to the islands of the Pacific. Nauru was no exception. The Japanese deported many Nauruans to work as slave labor in the Chuuk Islands. The ones who survived life under the Japanese on the Chuuk Islands were repatriated back to Nauru after the war’s end. The Nauruans had narrowly escaped the destruction of their culture at the hands of the occupying force. This historical event is celebrated by Nauru on the 26th of October and is known as Angam Day or “homecoming.” It’s clear that Nauru and its people have massive challenges ahead of them. Whether it is the environmental issues left by the dirty business of mining, the economic crisis of Nauru’s massive debt structure or the fact that Nauru’s location gives the island a front row seat for the impact of global warming, this country is a frontrunner for the problems that all nations are facing. Limited natural resources, consumption and overspending combined with global warming are the legacy being left for future generations all over the globe. If the people of Nauru had the character and sheer strength of will to survive the Japanese occupation, then there may be a good chance that they can handle the trifecta of doom staring down the barrel at these people. Any way you slice it, Nauru is a long shot. But, then again, I am always a sucker for a Cinderella story.
I called my bookie and, against his advice, placed my bet on Nauru. I am boarding a plane for this faraway nation–this 30-to-1 long shot, this butt-of-the-Pacific joke–to find out just what the Hell is going on halfway around the world.
The Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation & Tanna Centre for the Arts
The New Economics Foundation inaugural Happy Planet Index of 2006 studied 178 nations and determined the inhabitants of Vanuatu's archipelago to be the "Happiest People on Earth." Yet, the Tannese's daily confrontation with contemporary changes in cultural, economic and climate stability threaten the traditions of village life. Such changes have fueled investigation of modern society and culture. Through Art, we hope to engage this curiosity born of necessity on Tanna and meet it with our own desire to know and value their way of life.
Want to Help Develop a Culture and Climate-Sensitive Project?
The Tanna Center for the Arts proposes to foster an equal exchange of ideas and activities between the cultures of Oceania and the international arts community while working to rebuild a local living economy that retains youth and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK).
Founder's Statement
Oceania is a huge area of the South Pacific that contains myriad cultures which predate most of the civilizations of the rest of the world. It's region is a quilt of radically different cultures and ethnicities. And that's what drew me.
One afternoon I met one of the region's respected figures, Isso Kapum, and his father, Jack Kapum, who is Chief of the Naihné on Tanna. They invited me to become a 'Tanna-Man.' I ended up hanging out with several local i.e. 'tribal' groups on the island and was really blown away by their warmth, friendliness and wisdom. The Ni-Vanuatans have consistently been described as the "happiest people on Earth." If you come check out their islands, you can see why.
I felt that a lot of people in Asia, Africa, South America, the US and Europe never get a chance to see something like the beauty of Vanuatu, so I decided to open up a retreat on part of the property. I hope you can join us as we begin to set up this project, and watch it evolve from an idea to a fully functional, high tech artist retreat and center for the arts in one of the most beautiful parts of the South Pacific.
Help us set this artist retreat up!
In peace,
Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, NY 2010
Board of Advisors
'The Departing Island' by Iain Crichton Smith
Like an unbearable thought it sinks beyond
assiduous reasoning light and wringing hands,
or, as a flower roots deep into the ground,
it works its darkness into the gay winds
that blow about us in a later spirit.
Part 3 from A Life:
A rock, a death, a house in which were made
our narrow global seaward-going wings,
the rings of blue, the cloth both fine and frayed.
It sails within us, as one poet said,
its empty shelves are resonant. A scant
religion drives us to our vague tremens.
We drag it at our heels, as iron chains.
A winsome boyhood among glens and bens
casts, later, double images and shades.
And ceilidhs in the cities are the lens
through which we see ourselves, unmade, remade,
by music and by grief. The island sails
within us and around us. Startled we
see it in Glasgow, hulk of the humming dead,
and of the girls in cornfields disarrayed.
both from New Collected Poems by Iain Crichton Smith, published this month by Carcanet.
The Nauru Elegies by DJ Spooky & Annie K. Kwon
SUBLIMINAL KID PRODUCTIONS
The Nauru Elegies:
The Idea of an Island
DJ Spooky has teamed up with Annie K Kwon as part of the big media art biennial (Experimenta) 2009 to bring you a multimedia portrait of the island of Nauru, entitled ‘The Nauru Elegies: A Portrait in Sound and Hypsographic Architecture. The musical component of the Nauru Elegies "reflects colonial and postcolonial issues facing the digital economy of the 21st century translated into a string quartet, composed by Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky," while the architectural component conceptualized by Annie K. Kwon "spatializes and formalizes otherwise invisible economic flows and irreversible ecological devastation."
'As Man stands to Nature, so stands Art to Man.’
Richard Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Artwork of the Future) 1849
Project Description: The Republic of Nauru is a small island in the South Pacific Ocean. It is the world's smallest independent state and, at its core, represents a place at the most remote extreme of the planet. Its seemingly utopic geography and landscape stages a dystopic economy and society. It was, by consensus of several “Great Powers”, used as a raw resource until there was literally, nothing left. Nauru has been mined throughout the last two centuries for its phosphate deposits, which occupied 90% of the island. In the 1980s, phosphate exports briefly gave Nauruans one of the highest per capita incomes in the Third World. It is anticipated that the phosphate reserves will be completely exhausted before 2050. Despite this, the unemployment rate currently stands at 90%.
As a small territory with no exploitable resources, in the 1990’s Nauru turned to off-shore financing, and the creation of “virtual banks” as a way of earning sorely needed foreign currency. As such, it mirrors the off-shore island economies of The Cayman Islands, and continental havens like Luxembourg and Switzerland. As the Soviet Union collapsed, hundreds of billions of dollars “vanished” through the digital networks of the global financial system through places like Nauru, to re-appear in banks all over the world as “clean money.” For further information, view Jack Hitt’s December 10, 2000 article in the New York Times “The Billion-Dollar Shack”
The Nauru Elegies project looks at the combination of unique qualities that make a remote place like Nauru a core member of the 21st century global economy: It explores an island in a state of environmental collapse caused by deep seated financial irregularities, and how they affected the landmass of the island to the point of devastation. The Nauru Elegies posits that Nauru is a reflection site of many of the issues facing our contemporary information economy. The music component of the Nauru Elegies reflects colonial and postcolonial issues facing the digital economy of the 21st century translated into a string quartet, composed by Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, while the literary and multimedia component of the project spatializes and formalizes otherwise invisible economic flows and irreversible ecological devastation. Based on Miller’s explorations of the island, and his readings of texts like the economist Raj Patel’s economic treatise “The Value of Nothing,” Jared Diamond’s “Collapse,” Aldous Huxley’s last novel “Island,” Michel Houellebecq’s novel “The Possibility of an Island” (La Possibilité d'une île, 2005), Paul Virilio’s “The Aesthetics of Disappearance” and other historical texts, Miller has fashioned an “acoustic portrait” of the island. At heart, the Nauru Elegies is an art installation that explores the linkages between music composition, information structures based on economics, and new forms of GPS based locational media (architecture and design are also components) in collision with local infrastructure of an island in radical environmental collapse. The “Nauru Elegies” explores the uneasy tension between local versus global financial markets, and how they translate into aesthetics. In the “Nauru Elegies” a new digital media architecture reclaims an “autonomous zone” in the hyper-networked systems of global finance that contemporary life calls home.
Tax and data havens are black holes in the global financial system, and Nauru represented a place where a vast amount of finance “disappeared” into the mega-structures of the global financial markets. Nauru Elegies represents a virtual territory at a culmination of global currents, and creates music compositions that reflect that kind of virtuality.
The poet Goethe and the philosopher Schelling both once wrote: “architecture is nothing but frozen music.” The Nauru Elegies asks what happens if we reverse engineer that process through on-site recordings and footage translated through the prism of music and architectural form? The end result is an installation and music composition that blur the lines between what an artist creates and how a composer engages the 21st century’s information economy.
Technical write-up: 'The Nauru Elegies' is a technical synthesis of a live string ensemble, projected high-definition video footage, digital animation and live internet feed of GPS coordinates of specific aspects of the island and its physical and financial infrastructure. It is an orchestration of content retrieved and processed in multiple localities including research in New York City and documentation in Nauru. The “Elegies” are a statement of technology and media processes in the 21st century that is exponentially progressing to a more dematerialized and delocalized state.
www.djspooky.com/nauruelegies
Nick Mangan, Nauru, Notes from a Cretaceous World
Nauru, notes from a cretaceous world, 2010
Ink on paper
87 x 65cm
Nauru, notes from a cretaceous world, 2010Installation
Dowiyogo's ancient coffee coral table, 2010Coral lime stone
46 x 140 x 85cm
Dowiyogo's ancient coffee coral table, 2010(detail)
29 July 2010 - 28 August 2010, Sutton Gallery, Australia
Nick Mangan, Nauru, Notes from a Cretaceous World
Nauru, Notes from a Cretaceous World, follows Nick Mangan's second expedition to Nauru and digs deeper into the phosphate nation, surfacing relics of a redundant industry and examining the barren surreal landscape. Mixing sculpture, found objects, documentary style video footage, and more stylized filmic elements, this body of work reflects on the complex socio-political history of the small Pacific island of Nauru, a once lush and self-sustainable atoll which has plunged into financial and environmental destitution over the past two decades.
Mangan has taken on a curious proposal put forward by Bernhard Dowiyogo, the late Nauruan president, to rescue the nation's economy by turning the island's mined rock pinnacles into coral coffee tables, as a cue for the project. Nauruan rock, embodies the evolution of excrement to phosphate rich coral to its current barren form. Mangan's conscious re-staging of this exploitative appropriation in a contemporary context pinpoints a shift in Nauru's value as a source of mineral rich phosphate, to a potential site of authenticity. With their porous surfaces and curved edge, the materiality of Mangan's coffee tables does not only reference the social, financial and cultural turmoil endured, but physically mimics the contoured coastline of this petite island nation and its eroded, broken landscape.
With a focused depiction of Nauru, the main video projection immerses the viewer in eerily desolate scenes of surreal mined out pinnacles, a colourless coastline and relics of the redundant mining industry juxtaposed with images of Melbourne's Nauru House taken during the preceding height of national affluence. This projection is a poignant testament to the artist's personal expedition to the site and his physical presence is apparent in both his considered choice of footage and more directly in the introductory voice over.
An indirect, though timely reference to ‘the Pacific Solution' and the implication of Nauru's compliance predicated on its desperate financial situation, serves to highlight some of the major social inequalities that operate in the current world order. These themes of distance, transit and cultural exchange that underlie Mangan's personal exploration of Nauru, parallel broader concerns about the dynamics of the contemporary global political economy.
Following his studio residency at Gertrude Street Contemporary Art Spaces Nick Mangan has held numerous solo exhibitions at Sutton Gallery, Melbourne. Mangan, has also frequently been curated into significant group exhibitions including in 2004; Australian Culture Now, a collaboration between the National Gallery of Victoria and Australian Centre of the Moving Image, Melbourne; Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2004; Adventures with form in space: the fourth Balnaves Foundation Sculpture Project at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney in 2006 and Uncanny Nature at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2006. Mangan was the recipient of an Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarships in 2007. He completed post graduate studies at UDK in Berlin as part of this scholarship. Mangan created a major site specific work, A1 Southwest Stone, for the seventh SITE Santa Fe International Biennial in 2008. In 2009 he exhibited Between a Rock and a Hard Place at the Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Project Space Level 2 and earlier in 2010 Mangan presented, The Nauru Project, as part of the Adelaide Biennale of Art, at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.
President Marcus Stephen of Nauru meets the Obamas at the Metropolitan Museum New York along with other world leaders
Marcus Stephen, M.P. President of the Republic of Nauru
Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, Emir of the State of Qatar, and H.H. Sheikha Mozah
Paul Biya, President of the Republic of Cameroon, and his wife, Mrs. Chantal Biya
Alhaji Dr. Yahya A.J.J. Jammeh, President of the Republic of The Gambia
Prince Mohamed Bolkiah, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Brunei Darussalam, and H.R.H. Pengiran Anak Isteri Pengiran Anak Hajah Zariah
Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi, President of the Union of the Comoros, and his wife, Mrs. Djoudi Hadjir
T.H. Milo Djukanovic Prime Minister of Montenegro, and his wife, Mrs. Djukanovic
Minister of Foreign Affairs King-Akerele of the Republic of Liberia
Madhav Kumar Nepal, Prime Minister of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, and Mrs. Nepal
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey, and his wife, Mrs. Erdogan
And the Spanish president's goth daughters
TUVALU: Tiny Pacific state in crisis
By MICHAEL FIELD for stuff.co.nz
LATEST: A tiny South Pacific nation, Tuvalu, has resorted to emergency rule and its leadership under armed guard, sources on the capital atoll of Funafuti say. The third smallest state on earth - after the Vatican and Nauru - has a population of just 10,400. Sources say the country's solitary navy boat, Te Mataila, is now guarding the shoreline of the side-by-side residences of the Governor General Iakoba Itaeli and Prime Minister Willy Telavi. A state of emergency has been declared and any gathering of 10 or more people prohibited. There has been a march on Funafuti but so far there has been no violence, the source says.
Tensions are high however as people from the Nukufetau island community have demanded one of their members of parliament, Lotoala Metia, resign. There has been a continuing power struggle in the 15 seat Parliament. Last year, a large part of the New Zealand Defence Forces took part in a major exercise on Funafuti, designed to prepare the nation for tsunamis and other civil disasters. The island nation is 1100km north of Fiji and has drawn the attention of environmentalists who fear it will disappear due to global warming. Tuvalu makes much of its money from fishing and the sale of its internet domain suffix, dot TV.
Source:
© 2010 Fairfax New Zealand Limited
Country Profile BBC:
TUVALU
Tuvalu is a group of nine tiny islands in the South Pacific which won independence from the United Kingdom in 1978. Five of the islands are coral atolls, the other four consist of land rising from the sea bed.
All are low-lying, with no point on Tuvalu being higher than 4.5 metres above sea level. Local politicians have campaigned against global warming, arguing that climate change could see the islands swamped by rising sea levels.
OVERVIEW
Life on the islands is simple and often harsh. There are no streams or rivers, so the collection of rain is essential.
Coconut palms cover most of the islands, and copra - dried coconut kernel - is practically the only export commodity. Increasing salination of the soil threatens traditional subsistence farming.
Tuvalu depends on foreign aid, the income from the sale of tuna fishing licences and the interest from a trust fund set up in 1987. The sale of postage stamps also brings in revenues.
It is one of a handful of countries to have diplomatic relations with Taiwan, which has funded the construction of Tuvalu's largest building - a three-storey administrative headquarters.
Tuvalu has shown ingenuity by exploiting another source of income. It has sold its internet suffix - .tv - to a Californian company for several million dollars a year in continuing revenue. The company sells the suffix on to television broadcasters.
Some of the money has been used to pave roads - which were formerly made of crushed coral - and to build schools.
FACTS
Full name: Tuvalu
Population: 11,000 (UN, 2010)
Capital: Funafuti
Area: 26 sq km (10 sq miles)
Major language: Tuvaluan, English
Major religion: Christianity
Life expectancy: 62 years (men), 65 years (women) (UN)
Monetary unit: 1 Tuvaluan dollar, or 1 Australian dollar = 100 cents
Main exports: Copra, handicrafts
GNI per capita: Estimated to be lower middle income: $996 to $3,945 (World Bank, 2009)
Internet domain: .tv
International dialling code: +688
First Island Seen by Christopher Columbus For Sale
High Cay, Bahamas was the first land that Christopher Columbus spotted on his famous journey when he discovered the new world. Just imagine, crossing the ocean for months not knowing if you will ever see land again... and then all of a sudden, this beatiful island is spotted! Amazingly, this 31.46 acre island is on sale! Listed at $3,000,000 U.S., the island boasts 3 different beaches, and although it doesn't have a dock at the moment, there is an ideal sheltered spot to build one. The Bahamas is a great place to purchase an island, because of its stable government, balmy weather and close proximity to the U.S. Although this island has a lot going for it, the history of the island is what makes it really attractive.
Source: http://private-islands.blogspot.com/
Wirtland to grant citizenship to Julian Assange
Dec 28, 2010
Wirtland citizenship for Julian Assange
Government of Wirtland decided to grant Wirtland citizenship to Julian Assange. The official letter from the world's first sovereign cybercountry underlines Mr. Assange's "great accomplishments in changing the public perception of internet and its role in the world's balance of power". Official residence permit was issued in the name of Julian Assange.
"Your example has vividly demonstrated how quickly and efficiently the internet can influence real life. While citizenship of a cybercountry may seem merely symbolic today, you know better than anybody else the potential of cyberspace and the role of web social projects in the near future. Wirtland offers our citizenship to show our support to your case, and our appreciation of your achievements," - states the Wirtland's letter to Mr. Assange.
Mr. Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, is currently under house arrest in England pending an extradition hearing. For his work with WikiLeaks, Assange received a number of awards and nominations, including the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award and Readers' Choice for Time magazine's 2010 Person of the Year.
Source: http://wirtland.blogspot.com/2010/12/wirtland-citizenship-for-julian-assange.html
With kind regards,
Cristopher Luengo
PR Attache
Foreign Office
Government of Wirtland
WIRTLAND
www.Wirtland.com | www.Wirtland.net | http://Wirtland.blogspot.com | www.Wirtland.org
