Inspiration:
Brit Bunkley's Geolith , a 4:11 video depicting an apocryphal story about an interaction between Navajo tribal elder and the Apollo 11 astronauts, featuring LiDAR scans of two Native American geolith sites on the California/Arizona border and a NASA site in north central Arizona
NASA's upcoming Artemis project on the moon and current Perseverence mission on Mars
This very exciting news re. the above
the past 6 months of research around ecology, interconnection, and site coming together in the time spent at Islington Bay this past week
Pip Adam's fictional writing surrounding Laughing Stones Jumping Rocks exhibition at Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, earlier this year, and her perspective around the transformative and freeing power of fiction
Far from Earth, millions of kilometres away, Perseverance makes its way across an ancient shoreline. At a pace of just over 100 meters per hour, it is travelling through Jezero Crater, thought to have once been a vast lake at the base of a volcanic field whose rivers carved and shaped the earth around it, leaving traces of their pathways that remain etched in its surface today.
As the robot crosses the windswept landscape of its new home, a space that once held the planet’s waves and oceans, it slowly moves towards its closest volcano in hopes of one day ascending its peak. All the while, as it maps and surveys the soil below, it is searching for life - likely past, or maybe present, or perhaps a place for future...
Approximately 600 years ago, Rangitoto burst from the sea. It emerged with a roar, hissing and writhing from the ocean as molten rock erupted from beneath the waves; a jagged land forming between the violent reaction of salt water and magma.
This island is a new place, and yet a timeless place. Despite its distant green appearance, it has been for most of its young life inhospitable to life as we know it - void of trees, birds, insects, and even soil. Only when we move closer does it reveal its alien surface, still capable of radiating all the heat of the midday sun as if it remembers its creation.
Perhaps as surprising as its appearance from the sea, across its sprawling surface of jagged scoria, life emerged. A symbiotic relationship of fungi and algae found its place as the first pioneer amongst the vast lava fields. As these lichens took hold they burrowed into the rock, turning it to dust nanometre by nanometre; and over the course of hundreds of years of growth and disintegration, they created a regolith - a thin substrate which all plant life on the island relies upon. And with time and chance, and the silent processes of thousands of unassuming entities, the first colonies of the island - seeds carried across the waves on the wind - found root in this new earth.
Across the top of its dormant crater lie its hidden caves and tunnels, created as the molten rock rushing from its peak cooled and hardened at a rate too slow to contain itself. These liminal spaces provide shelter for the plants, root systems and sunless microbes that call this place home, along with the human visitors that journey through them. At a time, these places were once a shelter for the dead too - carefully carried across the rocky landscape to their quiet and final resting places within the veins of the land.
These places of transition are a reminder of the energy of the maunga, a shell marking its journey as thousands of tonnes of molten earth rushed to escape towards the water below. As the two made contact, the newly formed basalt scattered and froze, cooling to deep black and grey; and occasionally, as the iron-rich rock encountered the newfound air and water of its environment, oxidising to red...
On the horizon, just above the waves, a distant celestial neighbour can be seen, where Perseverance gradually makes its slow ascent. This red planet has its own peaks, perhaps having emerged from beneath its own waves and oceans long ago. Its red glow is familiar, a once oxidised landscape now reduced particles of volcanic dust and sand, billions of years of its own history suspended within its atmosphere.
Across its surface lie similar reminders of energy and origin, familiar hints of structures and forms that might one day be home to travellers who manage to slip beyond the earth and drift towards these distant, ancient shores.
It is thought that if we ever set foot on this Martian landscape that its lava tunnels will be where we will find shelter within its alien yet strangely familiar space. Perhaps, already, they are home for something, unseen or unfamiliar, to our eyes at least. Or perhaps they once were, and are now places of rest...
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