In its 15th issue, Limn goes offshore. People often look to offshores as places of escape, unfettered by regulation, law, and societal norms. Our researchers think through multiple offshores that collectively hint that such spaces, though defined through exception, are instead ubiquitous. The offshore, with its logics of escape and exception, reappears as a prevailing spatial logic of our times. This issue gathers stories from sites as diverse as call centers, gamer enclaves, detention facilities, special economic zones, experimental start-up states, and outer space to chart the great offshore: an archipelago of sites that confound the distinction between the here and its elsewheres.
In This Issue
The offshore is capitalism’s spatial logic
The call center dislocates the worker
Experiments in the Sewage System
لبحر تولّيّ حمراء
Submerged images trace submerged stories
The deep sea is up for grabs
Twisting the law in the Everglades
The Limn interview with filmmaker Alex Rivera.
Easy money, global connection, a viable escape
How to grow a country from scratch
Access to new tools
Choose your own regulation
Avoiding double taxation in 19th-century Southern Africa
The Limn interview with novelist and art critic Ben Eastham
The desert as an otherworldly substitute
Echoes of colonialism in Cape Town
Future-Proofing the North Sea
Artists imagine the synthetic offshore
A journey from formless desire toward formless space
Can we sense ocean acidification in a lab?
(1970-2026)