I'm trying to get back into the habit of making small blog posts on the things that I engage with, even if they are small or fleeting, as I always end up finding myself circling back around to them eventually. Here are two exhibitions I've been reading on over the past few days; thinking around the ideas behind them... I've also been thinking a lot on water and rocks over the Summer after last year's investigation into Rangitoto's ecology, especially around own my connection and proximity to it having grown up in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland. Recent events have brought those thoughts to the forefront again...
Interview with Maraea Timutimu on He kāwai whenua He kāwai whakapapa
Was sad to have missed seeing this exhibition in person, but found this interview on YouTube:
The exhibition focuses on the importance of whenua within mātauranga Māori and the ways it can connect people to stories, histories, identities, and whakapapa.
Series of large-scale colour photographs accompanied by the stones and rocks featured in them, collected from the waterways of her maternal and paternal kāinga at Matapihi, Tauranga, and Rūātoki, Eastern BOP.
"These are self portraits, because I recognise both my mother and my father in these places...and there's a whole plethora of whakapapa connected to this whenua..."
Whenua can be translated to "land", "ground", "country", but also "placenta"
Whakapapa can mean "lineage", "genealogy", but used as a way to express a connection to her environment and people - the whakapapa of an artwork in terms of how it is made (everything that's happened prior to its creation plus the creation/making itself)
Was interested in investigating how whenua can be used to create connections, especially for iwi distant from the places they whakapapa to -“When we view whenua in its natural state, we see that it is made up of layers. These layers all have a whakapapa, derived from the natural pigments of Papatūānuku (mother earth) connecting it to place and time. It depicts us and the makeup of our individual genealogy”
Thinking about what one takes away and what one can put back
photography as a medium in connection to place - photography can do the same thing as interacting directly with the whenua paint/objects, but also offers an opportunity for that whenua to return to where it originated (the images can be returned to where they are from)
Exhibition features combination of physical whenua and their photographic portraits - thinking about the relationship between the two and the experience of being in the presence of both
how do we create meaning and identity?
the portraits are a self portrait of the artist in a way - they are of the land she is from...
thinking about creation stories that reference directly to whenua; interesting play on self-portraiture constructed from whenua of both sides of her family
""What are the elements that create your identity?" is what I want viewers to take away. If this is how we create our whakapapa, through whenua, and this is what it looks like, how do you create that meaning for yourself? And how do you honour that? What does it look like, sound like, feel like... how can you feel one's identity through whenua and whakapapa?"
Te Pu, 2022, colour photograph
Kate van der Drift's Listening to a Wet Land
Video component, Dazzled (Numbed?) by a Myth (2022) watchable here (still below), and essay on the show at Pah Homestead by Alena Kavka readable here.
"In Listening to a Wet Land, van der Drift seeks to undo these histories of settler seeing, drawing on her extensive visual research conducted in the Hauraki Plains. The subject of her recently completed MFA, the Plains are an area van der Drift has been visiting regularly since 2017, where she has undertaken numerous recordings through sound, video, Super 8 film, and the camera-less images she has termed “river exposures”. These latter images have become somewhat iconic of van der Drift’s practice, symbolising the broader impetus of the Hauraki Plains project. Situated in the heavily comprised ecology of the Plains, where the water quality is among the worst in the country, van der Drift’s exposures seek to respond to the deep embedment of colonial history not only within the land, but also within the conventional methods of its visual representation."
On her large-scale prints:
The idea of letting the river write its own message - submerging negatives in the water for certain durations, allowing the accumulation of salts, farming pollutants, algae, etc. to occur as it does
a collaboration...
explores the history of the Hauraki plains - the "entanglements between founding colonial fantasy, total ecological transformation, and the foundational tenets of particular kind of ruralised dairy-driven Pākehā identity"*
examining the ideological and aesthetic concept of 'landscape'; references photography's role in defining and shaping the idea of New Zealand in the imaginations of those overseas
"Early photographic technology arrived in Aotearoa shortly after colonisation. ‘Promotional landscapes’ by photographers were used to demonstrate how industrious tracts of land could be if converted to settlements. In places like the Hauraki Plains–the setting for these river exposures–this illusion has caused ongoing strife as the land attempts to return to its former wetland state. Local farmers expend large amounts of capital to prevent flooding or exceeding run-off limits in wet seasons, despite Joseph Banks' early claims that “Swamps might doubtless easily be drained” to establish a colony in the region. In contrast to this colonial legacy of photography in areas like the Plains, van der Drift’s cameraless approach enables chance, indeterminacy and co-authorship with the non-human at each site; a restorative method which resists a more possessive gaze over the landscape.' - Nina Dyer
Installation Shot: Kate van der Drift, Listening to a Wet Land, Pah Homestead (2022)
From Kate's website:
"Listening to a Wet Land is a research project comprising an essay film and a series of large-scale prints made from camera-less ‘river exposures’. Situated in the fragile waters of the Hauraki Plains, the visual research is primarily field recordings. Both the digital moving image and analogue photographs explore stories of loss, of damage incurred in the politics of land use, as well as stories of hope and the potential for repair through agency of the more-than-human.
I’ve termed the camera-less works ‘river exposures’ because they are exposed to water in the absence of daylight by submerging film in lightproof holders in the Piako awa’s tributaries. Farm run-off and saltwater combine with sediment and bacteria. Algae have grown and bacteria have eaten away at the negative’s emulsion: durational accretion created by the water’s action and reaction with its chemical compounds. The films are placed in the river for 2-4 weeks depending on the season and moon phase, then developed by hand in a darkroom.
The essay film Dazzled (Numbed?) by a Myth is comprised of two sections. The first part is an historical account of the social and ecological transformation in the Hauraki Plains since colonisation revisited through the writing of Pākehā ecologist and historian Geoff Park. In the second part, the narrator reads a letter I wrote to American environmental non-fiction writer Barbara Hurd, exploring some of the conceptual terrain in her book Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination. The essay film was edited during the five-month lockdown of 2021 with footage I collected while making the Hauraki river exposures in 2019 and 2021. The title Dazzled (Numbed?) by a Myth is borrowed from Astrida Neimanis and her expanded question, “How will we, as nature, water and climate contracted, continue to inscribe attunement, listening, partial dissolution, collectivity, care, curiosity, wonder, grace, gratitude or other modes of becoming-with, instead of writing against them, dazzled (numbed?) by a myth of separateness?”
I would like to acknowledge and extend gratitude toward tāngata whenua of the Hauraki Plains, Ngāti Hako, the land and waters where this research is situated, and which I have visited as manuhiri while making work. With a deep respect for Te Ao Māori and its inherent interconnected understanding of the more-than-human world, this research seeks to understand some of Hauraki’s social and ecological system stories, their connections and interdependencies."
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