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Paper Short Abstract:

This essay documents how fossilized giant clamshells challenge the binaries between life and non-life and how the process of turning them in their afterlife into artwork becomes a post-mortem care. It reflects on fossilization as the potentiality for marine death and marine life in varied forms.

Paper Abstract:

In the South China Sea, where subsidized and militarized Chinese fishers were mobilized to support China’s construction of artificial islands on coral reefs, the extraction of fossilized giant clam shells from living coral in the disputed territories served as an aesthetic claim to contested territory, property and to ‘ecological civilization.’ This essay documents how fossilized giant clamshells in the disputed Paracel and Spratly archipelagos challenge the binaries between life and non-life and how local fishers perceive the process of turning them in their afterlife into artwork as a form of post-mortem care. Engaging with existing concepts of ruination (Stoler 2013, Meskell 2018) and animal remains (Bezan and McKay 2022), the essay critically reflects on fossilization as the potentiality for marine death and marine life in multiple and varied forms. Conceptualizing fossilization as a non-human variation of ruination, I argue that the categorization of giant clamshell fossils as ‘(non-) creatures’ relies on the human classificatory gaze and on the Chinese state’s territorializing vision of the coral reefs as ‘oceanic oases.’