MicroCon 2023, Part II: A Conversation with Carolyn, Queen of Ladonia
Talking to a 21st-century micro-monarch.
Last week, I wrote about MicroCon 2023, specifically the delegates from the Kingdom of North Barchant, who traveled all the way to Joliet from Rigos, Latvia. As I mentioned in that post, MicroCon is “the largest biennial gathering of micronationalists in the world,” a get-together for leaders of unofficial states declaring sovereignty. These tiny countries may or may not exist in physical space (Obsidia, “the world’s only mobile feminist nation,” is a rock glued inside a suitcase). Reasons for starting a micronation vary from political protest to social connections to wanting to make art to boredom.
Ladonia, one of the longest-running micronations, started as a sculpture garden in the Swedish wilderness. In 1980, artist Lars Vilks started working on a stone sculpture called Arx, and his nine-story, 75-ton driftwood sculpture, Nimis (Latin for “too much”) on the Kullaberg Pennisula.
It took two years for Swedish authorities to discover Vilks’ handiwork. Once they did, it triggered years of legal battles, as well as a literal ones (Nimis has survived chainsaws, fire and bureaucrats).
In 1996, Vilks pronounced the one-sqaure kilomteter where the artwork stood to be an indedpendent state: the Kingdom of Ladonia. Though Ladonia has generated a lot of media coverage, Vilks made international news in 2007 for his cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed, which made him the target of death threats. He lived under police protection for the rest of his life.
He still traveled to Ladonia to work on Nimis, and in summer of 2021, gave a speech during a celebration of Ladonia’s 40th anniversary, after the Minister of Art and Jump, Fredrik Larsson, performed “a celebration jump.”
Two months later, Vilks died in a car crash, which was first thought to be suspicious, but was ultimately ruled an accident.
As Ladonia’s website notes, “what began as an effort to protect a sculpture is now, 25 years later, a nation of more than 28,000 non-resident citizens who share a desire for a free society where art and expression are valued and encouraged.” The current ruling monarch, Queen Carolyn, was coronated in 2011. Since then, she’s paid visits to Ladonia in person (once when Sweden’s Princess Victoria was doing a lap around the area via yacht) and has a long list of queenly duties, including interacting with current Ladonians, reviewing applications for new Ladonians, overseeing the website, managing 125 cabinet ministers, talking to the media, and making sure Nimis is properly maintained. We talked to her post-MicroCon, after she’d had time to recover from hosting this year’s MicroCon.
This interview has been shortened and edited for clarity.
I wanted to start by asking how you got involved in micronations.
In the mid-’90s, I was the co-founder of an Internet service provider, so I had a lot of time with an Internet connection at my disposal, and our company was mentioned in an issue of WIRED. I don’t remember if that was the issue in which Sealand was mentioned, or if it was adjacent to that, but I read the article on Sealand, and I thought it was interesting.
So I started digging into it, and fell down the rabbithole, and I stumbled on Ladonia. On their home page, it said they were looking for people to help them build their government. I was a political science major, so I went, wow! I wouldn’t mind doing that. I’m going to apply to be a citizen.
I applied, [and] submitted this 20-page business case for why they should annex Gary, Indiana. (Laughs.) They wrote back, and said, we loved your application. Would you like to be a cabinent minister? I said, sure, I’d like to be a cabinet minister. So that’s how that started. I was in the cabinet as a minister doing government-y things until 2010, when Yvonne, the previous Queen — long story short, she kind of decided she didn't want to do it anymore, and stopped responding. The Swedes used to tell people that she disappeared, and that… it has connotations. And we should probably avoid that. She just didn't want to do it anymore. So the cabinet exercised their constitutional right to vote her off the throne, so she was abdicated in absentia. This created a vacancy on the throne. The Constitution says when there's a vacancy on the throne, we hold an election, and the nominees are accepted from the general population, and that they must be female and they must already be existing citizens. And so my name got nominated. I did not nominate myself, for the record!
There were five other nominees. We all had to submit a little recording and a campaign pitch about why we thought we’d make a good queen. Then there was a vote. The voting lasted for a week. And it was… it shouldn’t have been nerve-wracking. But it was! And I won. So on the second of June, 2011, I was proclaimed Queen of Ladonia. And then in September, on the 19th, I traveled there, and there was a coronation.
So you were ruling remotely when you were coronated.
Yeah. And almost everyone's remote. We have 6,000 citizens that are in Sweden, and they’re not even all by Ladonia. We have 28,000 citizens overall, so everyone else is really spread out around the world. I think we've got representation now from about 100 countries, so we're we're everywhere, and we're all nomads. Nobody physically lives inside of Ladonia. We all have dual citizenship, and we're all nomadic residents. We stay where we are, and we participate remotely.
What does the Queen of Ladonia do when she’s not hosting MicroCon?
So a lot of what I do is go around and attend different conferences, and I speak to the media. We have documentary crews that come to Ladonia. We have different TV crews, newspaper crews — it gets a lot of tourism, it photographs really well, so there’s a lot of places that want to do vacation spot kinds of things. So part of my job is interacting with the media, making sure if they’re English speaking, I’m there to give the tour. If it’s a German crew, we’ve got German speakers, if it’s a Swedish crew, we have plenty of Swedish speakers.
I also have a lot of jobs that aren’t strictly queen jobs. I run the website; I supervise the citizenship applications, so it’s a lot of researching the applications and reviewing the essay portion, and deciding if they’re going to be confirmed or not. If they’re not confirmed, we send rejection letters, and if they are confirmed we have to make the certificates and send those out, and are properly recorded. There are souvenirs that need to be designed and sourced. We have to find vendors and we have to set that up on the e-commerce stuff. There are bank accounts to manage. We've secured two trademarks in the last year, one in Sweden and one in the EU, for the name, which means that we don't have to pay anyone to to maintain and protect our brand. We monitor the social media. It’s a lot of work! (Laughs.)
Then there's then there's the kind of administration aspect of the country, because we have a 125 ministers in the cabinet. It’s very similar to herding cats. They're kind of all over the place sometimes, and getting them to come together long enough to consider topics that are somewhat serious — not all the topics are serious — but some of them are. We have to make decisions about art maintenace trips.
The money we raise thorugh our souvenir sales and through our titles and nobility go into fuding the teams that go to Ladonia to maintain the artworks. The artworks are made of wood, and they’re exposed on the side of a mountain next to the ocean. If they’re not constantly maintained, they will crumble and fall into the sea. Or become dangerous for tourists. According to the visitors and convention bureau, we get about 40,000 visitors to Ladonia every year. There are a lot of people going, and climbing all over it, and we want to make sure it’s a good experience for everyone.
We're not allowed to have signage, we're not allowed to do a lot of things because we're still technically an illegal structure in Sweden. And so there's also that, the bickering back and forth with the local governing bodies. Sometimes they have people in place that like us. Right now, we don’t. So there are those kinds of things, as well.
So I’m curious about what your experience was when you first physically traveled to Ladonia and saw Nimis.
It's just so big. I think the mass and the enormity of what it’s become is hard to put into words, and it's hard to convey in images, because you're standing next to it, and you just feel so small. It just keeps going, and going and going. It's built kind of like a labyrinth. So to get from the side of the mountain down to the beach — the beach is not a sandy beach. It’s not a rocky beach. It’s literally giant boulders kind of stuck together. And you can fall between them pretty easily. So to get from the side of the mountain down down there, you have to either climb down the cliff face, which is difficult and dangerous, or you have to go through Nimis, which is a labyrinth. So you're you're you're kind of climbing through it, making sure you don't fall, or stab yourself, trying to figure out which way to go because there's different tunnels that go off in different directions and you're not hundred percent sure which way is going to get you down. Meanwhile, there's little kids crawling all over you because they're much faster, and they're mad that you're taking so much time. (Laughs.)
It's just really intense. It’s a physical effort to get there, and it's a physical effort to get back out. So it's just really… it's an experience that’s difficult explain. The pictures definitely don't do it justice. And I’ve been there in all kinds of weather. I've been there at night. I've been there in the winter, which I don’t 100 percent recommend because it’s difficult to see the path, and it gets dark very early there. There’s no lights. It’s probably not the best time to see it. It’s a very cool view, but you’re constantly afraid you’re going to fall off the side of the cliff and die.
Summer's when most poeple go. Summer’s probably the safest to be there. Boats come by really close and look at it. From what I understand, Princess Victoria of Sweden has anchored her yachts nearby and come ashore to visit. So, we get our share of royalty. (Laughs.)
Maybe one day you’ll cross paths and exchange queenly salutations!
That would be cool. (Laughs.) Maybe. But I'm kind of trying to steal some some of her lands, so that’s probably not going to go well. (Laughs.)
I wanted to touch on Lars Vilks. He founded Ladonia to protect Nimis, right?
Yes and no. So it was Lars and a group of about 13 or 14 other people. They weren't even all artists. Some of them were lawyers, some of them were just local people. So the goal at the outset wasn't necessarily to provide protection for the artwork. The goal was more of political statement. Sweden had been trying to enforce their laws on his land for more than a decade, and they failed. And the artworks were still there. Lars and this group of lawyers and other artists had determined that Lars had achieved a state of permanent occupation. And when you are in de facto, if not, de jure control of a piece of land, that's kind of the definition of sovereignty. So to punctuate his his triumph over the the local government, he declared he declared Ladonia soveriegn.
Can you touch on MicroCon and micronations for people who aren’t familiar? It seems like a lot of the media coverage tilts toward “Wow, this is quirky,” coverage, and misses some of the more serious aspects of the conference.
There are varying degrees of seriousness. I would say that Ladonia is probably at the more serious end of the spectrum than many others. But it's very easy to write, and visuals are very easy, if you take the approach of “take a look at the clowns, they’re dressing up.”
When you start looking at the political aspects of it, and trying to discuss what is the role of a nation in the post-nationalist era, and what is the function of a border, and what’s the function of a state? You start getting into those conversations and a lot of peoples’ eyes just glaze over. It’s not necessarily the most fun thing to talk about with big groups of people. It starts to get nerdy very quickly, and the pool of people who are into that is small. (Laughs.)
What is the future of Ladonia?
Well, now that we have the trademarks, I feel a lot more secure in proceeding with the other things that we were doing. We also have, in terms of irons in the fire, I've set up a not-for-profit foundation in the U.S., which is mostly because that's where I'm at, soo it's easy for me to to deal with the financials and registrations. The foundation's role is to is to raise and secure funds to maintain and preserve the artworks, and then also to support micronationalism and to support free speech and free expression activities around the world.
We have in our ministerial cabinet, we have some activists — are you familiar with FEMEN? They’re the ladies who go around protesting without their shirts off. The head of the Swedish chapter has needed some funding to go to some of her conventions. You know, in the back of my head, there's always: “what if she gets arrested? We should probably bail her out.” So we’re taking care of those things, and in the process we’re taking care of applying for our federal 501c3 status.
The plan is to join a U.N. subcommittee, as a watcher. There’s a lot of different things we could focus on with the UN, because they’ve got things ranging from women’s rights to climate stuff and enviromental stuff, and then they’ve got free speech, they’ve got all kinds of things. We really would like to get more active in real-world politics, because I think we’ve got an opportunity to really push the boundaries of what is commonly accepted as a movement, or a nation. What is a nation? And that’s something we’re seeking to not only explore, but push the boundaries.
How does one apply for citizenship?
There's there's a form on the website to make sure people don't completely misunderstand what it's about. We check to make sure that they understand what it is they're applying for. And there are there're some giveaways usually that people think that they can live in Ladonia, or that it's going to be a free and easy way for them to get a work permit in the EU. So generally, those types of people, as soon as I explain to them, this isn't what you think it is, they’re like, “Oh, forget it.” There are people that think I'm lying when they say that, and then we get in arguments, and then “OK, you’re rejected, too.”
Then we also screen for things like people are who they say they are. If they think they're going to slide in with it with a fake name…. I'm pretty good at the Internet! I can figure out if your name is fake. I've had some people that applied and said they were 21 years old, except when I Googled their name, I found out they were in fourth grade, and on a soccer team. So those kinds of things I'm really checking for. And then also I read the essays, and if the essay makes it sound like they think this is a big joke and that they just want to get in so they can make fun of people. Yeah, you know, we're going to pass on that, too, right?
We all respect each other. Everybody's got different goals and different different reasons for joining. But none of those reasons are to make fun of other people.
What if someone wants to visit Ladonia and see Nimis?
There's a little map. We mark the trees with Ns, and if you follow the Ns, you’ll get there. But park rangers will go in and obliterate our Ns periodically. So we go out, we we mark the trees, we mark on the ground. The rangers go in, they mess up our Ns. It’s a battle all the time. But it’s not the most impossible thing to find. If you have a GPS, you can probably find it. Just for the love God, watch where you put your feet, and don’t fall off the side of the mountain!
Anything else that you want to add?
I hope people who didn’t make it to the U.S. MicroCon can join the EU MicroCon. That’s August 11 and 12 in Ypres, Belgium. We’re co-hosting that with Landrensis, and we’re excited. This will be the first EU-based MicroCon. We’re hoping it will be the first of many. And it’s not too late to get tickets!
I thought the article carried itself like royalty...
the videos were really cool. I would like to visit such a place.