It’s the second to last day of the residency already! I spend a large part of the morning at a table in the sun, looking out over the hill with the graveyard on it, reading the final chapters of Pamela M Lee’s book ‘Chronophobia’. Its second-to-last paragraph captures something which is reflected all around me at the residency, and which, in my own way, i’ve been trying to put into words for months:
“In worlds in which the speed of technology is matched only by its spatial reach, time becomes that much more political, of global consequences. Perhaps this is why now, more and more, we hear of groups, communities, and scattered networks of individuals taking pause. They’re pausing not in any naïve effort to “go back” – following a luddite’s primitivist convictions to return to a mythic past – but to slow down. For it is in slowness and the capacity to parse one’s own present that one gains ground on what’s coming up next, perhaps restores to the every day some degree of agency, perhaps some degree of resistance. In slowly taking measure of the endless present, one refuses teleological end games. Instead one rests with the immanence of being and the potential to act.”
Walking (slowly) into N2, there is a group of artists clustered around the head of WITT’s department of Maori Studies, Tengaruru Wineera. He has brought along various Taonga, including three Ponamu Patu, so old, that he doesn’t know exactly how old, but to give us an idea, two have “been used”, and have chips and cracks around the ridge of their blades, from, as he puts it, “bouncing off someone’s skull”. Derek asks to contact mic the Patu’s surface, and soon we are listening to the sounds of a bone and fingernails rubbing over their highly resonant, glass-hard stone surfaces, which “sing”. Then Derek takes all the Patu to a soundproofed room in another part of the campus to record them more avidly.
Tengaruru then stays for an hour, first he talks to Ken about his kite project and the spiral which decorated the night flying kite, which he identifies as a Koru. The trans-cultural nature of the spiral is on Ken’s mind, as is the intricacy of the fact that the recording of the Huia which he has downloaded may in fact be an imitation by a Maori vocalist – the recording being a little too clean for the 1910s. This has a swathe of ramifications considering it was such a call which would summon the Huia through the forest in order to then die at the hand of the voice which called it.
Raewyn is fully immersed in an impromptu soldering workshop with Diana. On her table, as part of her project to collect the greens of the area, she has left a Kawakawa branch with four leaves attached. Tengaruru explains this is a mourning bush, that a wreath of its leaves is worn by mourners, and it is also used as a medicinal poultice.
Tengaruru then talks with with Steve from C5 about comparative cultural notions of mapping and geographic locatedness in relation to people and objects. He explains that the mountain, Taranaki, is both a spiritual and geographic orientation gage for its local people. We discover that a pool in the region C5 are leading a group to tomorrow morning has an intriguing history, specificially that when the diseases which attended colonization swept through local populations, this pool served a cleansing, even a purging function. Even now, newborn babies are taken to be washed in the pool. Although not everyone remembers this practice, he says. “Get lost with G5 searching for invisible waterfalls with a GPS reciever”, the sign on the noticeboard states. Later i read a post on Norie and Maria’s blog which reads: “The work poses the question: is it possible to bring something that does not exist into existence by searching for it?”
Sitting around still later with a bottle of Mud House Pinot Noir listening to Trudy, Adam, and Sara discussing the feasability of the notion of an interlinked series of residencies which access the resources of various institutions around the country, we are suddenly also talking about the idea of a NZ Media Lab; Adam’s online posting on the ADA list around the topic, after discussions with other ADA members at SCANZ, speculated that NZ may have “more of a need of a distributed network of labs of some kind to reflect the geography and population distribution of the NZ digital arts community.”
At around 10:00, we leave for Okatura beach to witness Ken’s second night-flight kite test. The wind is not particularly good but the sound of the crashing, tumultuous sea and the moonlit silhouettes of spiky native vegetation are striking. Adam is videoing the test, and everyone else has a digital camera. This kite hovers momentarily in the air twice before drifting back to earth, its trail of blue LEDs and shape rendering it even ghostlier than its predecessor. The Huia recording, which has been sounding from Ken’s laptop for most of the afternoon, and is now strangely object-based, cocooned in its wrapping of gauzy material, isn’t attatched to the kite this time, but fills a gap in the natural soundscape while Ken walks back along the shoreline. The romantic and the ecologist in me both close their eyes to listen.
When I open them again the long hypnotic line of the horizon has a lit structure, which could be an oil rig but is more likely a giant ocean-going liner, poised in its distance where the grey meets the black. Closer in, white crests of the waves are endlessly coming in, their stark seriality for some reason reminding me of some lines in a Plath poem: “Cold blanks approach us / they move in a hurry”. I think of Agent Orange manufacture in the Taranaki region, and its existence in buried underground storage tanks. On the way back Ken tells me about a work in a group show he was once in. The artist in question researched insects affected by the Chernobyl disaster, which had changed shape, or had limbs that no longer worked, and then drew these sad and sickly mutations in the highly formal manner of Victorian Scientific Illustration.
Returning to the warmth of the work space, I break my rather wordless meditation on landscape and chemicals by talking with Caro and Vicki about blogging, the use of the English language, the way in which non-native speakers are generally far better at isolating words that fit particular concepts, and the creation of Caro’s hotel as a process analogous to knitting, ie, if you make a mistake you have to unpick the whole row: Code and Craft, it’s all the same thing. I’m sure Ada Byron would have agreed.
I am trying to figure out how to develop audiences in NZ, Michelle how to ’survive’ and ’stay in the game’, and Badi how to keeping on making stuff as a part of his life. The quiet room, cups of tea and friendly & meaningful chats were great after these last days of pavement pounding with finding ’stuff’ needed for installations and in the South Hall also, which is massive, and is a tent built on a car park. Just what the curating doctors ordered. Thanks Beryl and Sarah, we will be back!
