Part I
Resilience 1 Negotiating the Ontological Gap
Place, Performance, and Media Art Practices in Aotearoa/New Zealand
Janine Randerson and Amanda Yates
Whakapapa
MÄori whakapapa is an oral transmission of genealogical lines of descent in humans, animals, and plants in a densely layered cosmogony. Whakapapa offers up a radical expansion of âthe humanâ to include our larger kinship group: the lizards, birds, and ferns; the rivers, mists, and mountains. MÄori environmental scientist Mere Roberts and colleagues describe the telling of whakapapa as:
typically beginning with the origin of the universe and the primal parents, then continuing to trace the descent of living and nonliving, material and immaterial phenomena, including humans.
(Roberts et al. 2004, 1)
Whakapapa establishes an ontological framework that involves a paradigm shift of sorts for Western academia, a turning from a primary concern with semiotic subjectivities to a more holistic account of the vast biomass as connected to the human. A cosmogony of the world composed of bacteria, phytoplankton, ants, whales, trees, and humans, as well as intra- and extraplanetary energies, resource systems, and flows. The MÄori term tangata whenua (âpeople of the landâ) describes a cosmogony where humans and all other biotic and abiotic life are the progeny of PapatĆ«Änuku, the Earth Mother. To understand plant and animal whakapapa requires knowledge not only of plant and animal names but also of their accompanying narratives.1
Artist and theorist Dr. Huhana Smith describes whakapapa as a meta-account of descent; whanaungatanga stands for the reciprocal relations established as part of a highly complex âsocio-cultural-ecological systemâ (2012a, 2). In this framework, all of our actions occur within, or in borders between, socio-cultural-ecological discourses whether we acknowledge it or not, including the domain of contemporary art and design, as we describe below.
This chapter considers the work of three MÄori artists who engage whakapapa concerns through creative art and design practice as a generative mode of whanaungatanga. Robertsonâs media artwork Uncle TasmanâThe Trembling Current that Scars the Earth (2008) brings genealogical narratives to bear on a regional ecological issue of air and water quality in the town of Kawerau.
MÄori artists often attend to situated tribal issues, yet in Robertsonâs work the global polity is implicated in the transnational flows surrounding the market for the Tasman corporationâs paper products and the complex chain of environmental effects to which their Kawerau factory contributes. Shannon Te Aoâs performance artwork, Untitled (after RÄkaihautĆ«) (2012a) follows the ancestral pathways of the chief RÄkaihautĆ« as he molds landscapes and lakes with his footprints, according to oral tradition.
By mark-making with digging sticks in the Nelson mudflats at the top of New Zealandâs South Island, Te Ao draws attention to the seabed and foreshore as a site of ongoing contention over sovereignty rights between the government and the MÄori. Amanda Yatesâs Pop-up Garden / MÄra Iti (2012) aims to reshape urban landscapes by bringing edible gardens into the city.
Working with the Wellington City Council and referencing MÄori urban forms that bind landscape and architecture together, Yates utilizes the pop-up garden as an eco-political tool and change agent. We will argue that the respective practices of Robertson, Te Ao, and Yates build relationships (whakawhanaungatanga) between entities and entity-environments through sensitive, forceful, and questioning engagements in the world.
We propose that the video works, performances, and landscape actions are cultural expressions that attempt to bring ontological difference to the fore. The âontological turnâ in recent humanities and social science discourse has been questioned by some Indigenous researchers (Hunt 2014; Todd 2014), yet we argue that this âturnâ as articulated in contemporary philosophies can be supported by the sustained position of the nonhuman in Indigenous philosophies. We begin our discussion by clarifying the debate and our proposal, which builds on Huntâs notion of the productive ontological âgap.â Then, turning to the work of these MÄori artists, we suggest that art and design projects can activate change in the audience through discussion, sharing food, or affective response. Sensorial approaches to nonhuman entities such as mud, mist, steam, or plants probe âgapsâ (Hunt 2014) within normative cultural frameworks where socio-ecological change can be imagined.
Ontology and Indigeneity
To operate within the frame of whakapapa requires an ongoing questioning of how Indigenous concepts are being discussed, and for whom, to ensure that such accounts remain mobile and relational. We will preface our account of specific cultural/creative practices by examining both ontology and Indigeneity in the context of the ontological turn across the social sciences and humanities. Movements from various disciplines have foregrounded the agency of things or assemblages of human and nonhuman and a turn toward material and multispecies relations (Adamson 2012; Barad 2007; Bennett 2010; Braidotti 2013; de la Cadena 2010; Haraway 2008; Latour 2004a; Stengers 2005; Whatmore 2002). These authors share concerns around the nature of being and provoke a radical reshaping of how various fields have conceived of human and nonhuman agency, change, materiality, and cosmopolitical, ecological, multispecies, and object relations. Multiple worldings, rather than âthe one cosmosâ or a mononaturalist approach (Latour, 2004b, 453), meet in the practices we will discuss.
Current ontological concerns parallel Indigenous thought around nonhuman agency and material vitality, embraced in the aforementioned concepts of whakapapa and whanaungatanga. Anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena (2010), while writing of Peruvian Indigenous practices, draws on philosopher of science Isabelle Stengersâ (2005) cosmopolitical stance that advocates a âslowed-down reasoningâ in relation to the sacred mountains, known by name as earth-beings. Like RĆ«aumoko, the god of earthquakes in MÄori cosmology, who is referenced in Natalie Robertsonâs work (2008), the Andean mountain-being Ausangate demands respect, or he may become dangerous (de la Cadena 2010). This lack of separation between nature and humanity is contentious when incompatible ontologies, such as corporate forestry interests and Indigenous cosmogonies, clash over issues such as air and water rights. For instance, the representation of an alternate MÄori cosmos in New Zealand director Niki Caroâs film Whale Rider (2002) foregrounds a multispecies relation (Adamson 2012, 35). The NgÄti Konohi iwi regard the whale-shaped island in Whangara as part spirit (tÄ«pua), part human (tangata), and part taniwha (whale or water-being)âqualities also transmuted into geological form. Yet Robertson also comments (2011) that, tragically, the island, Te Ana-o-Paikea, had its tail cut off and removed for road gravel.
Some Indigenous scholars, working with similar concepts to vitalism and agential matter within Indigenous knowledge systems, have observed the ongoing âturnâ occurring in sections of EuroAmerican academia with interest and some irony. Social anthropologist Zoe Todd, an Indigenous Canadian, in critiquing the (neo)colonial time-lag for non-Indigenous academics, tells us to think deeply about how:
the Ontological Turnâwith its breathless ârealizationsâ that animals, the climate, water, âatmospheres,â and nonhuman presences like ancestors and spirits are sentient and possess agency, that ânatureâ and âcultureâ, âhumanâ and âanimalâ may not be so separate after allâis itself perpetuating the exploitation of Indigenous peoples.
(Todd 2014)
In addition, Indigenous researcher Sarah Hunt (2014) argues that âthe potential for Indigenous ontologies to unsettle dominant ontologies can be easily neutralized as a triviality, a case study, or a trinket, as powerful institutions work as self-legitimating systems that uphold broader dynamics of (neo)colonial powerâ (30). We share this wariness as writers of both MÄori and PÄkehÄ (European settler) descent, but also share a sense of optimism about the possibility of redress of historical injustice that an alignment between Indigenous thought and the ontological turn might produce. The creative strategies discussed below operate from an implicit concern to counter colonial accounts of place and history.
The Negotiated Gap
The value of visual, aural, and performative storytelling as history, representation, and genealogical account is part of our reading of the creative works. The stories occupy multiple temporalities and begin to heal the violence of boundary practices that are asserted through the âmononaturalistâ representations of landscape and âland as resourceâ (Watson 2014, 76). Hunt (2014) highlights a gap between Indigenous and modern ways of knowing while identifying the porous, elusive nature of knowledge itself. Describing an engagement with the ritual practices of the Kwakwakaâwakw potlatch, Hunt notes that:
the ontological differences are difficult to explain, yet that is where their power liesâin the spaces between intellectual and lived expressions of Indigeneity. I would propose that these gaps in regimes of knowledge provide sites where ontological shifts are possible. So how do we better expose and explore these gaps? [âŠ] One starting place might be accepting the partiality of knowledge. Its relational, alive, emergent nature means that as we come to know something, as we attempt to fix its meaning, we are always at risk of just missing something (2014, 30â31).
The gap, for the purposes of our argument, is the space in-between, a space of negotiation that exceeds human language and breaks away from a hermetic concern with human behaviors toward other ways of knowing. We suggest that the material and performative practices of art can operate in an unfixed gap, although art is never an unmarked, apolitical space. Many art museums locally and internationally have exhibited the moving image work of Robertson and Te Ao, and Yatesâs Pop-up City / MÄra Iti was sited in a public square in partnership with the Wellington Council in our capital city; so there is a relationship between artists and mainstream institutions in postcolonial Aotearoa/New Zealand. Yet creative activity occupies a differentiated zone where political resistance can be expressed in free play. Whereas informed MÄori protest marches known as hÄ«koi (Nathan 2015) are often portrayed by the mainstream media as the radical actions of a vocal few (New Zealand Herald 2011), art is often accepted as less threatening than street protest, but the implications are no less radical. By drawing pre-colonial customs into contemporary reshapings or representations of the land or landscape, Robertson, Te Ao, and Yates reveal the partiality of bicultural exchange. The MÄori cosmopolitical position that things have mauri (âlife forceâ) is a useful prompt to question the perceived fissure in non-Indigenous ontologies between subject and object, human and the nonhuman.
Natalie Robertson, Uncle TasmanâThe Trembling Current That Scars the Earth
While the academic tradition has historically presented itself as having âno geopolitical determinationsâ (as noted by Gayatri Spivak 1988, 24), Indigenous academics often speak from a grounded ethics of care both for local polities and the wider implications of care for climate or environment. Over the last decade NgÄti Porou/Clann Dhonnchaidh artist Natalie Robertsonâs practice has exemplified Smithâs (2012b) assertion that the restoration of fragmented ecological systems is interdependent on the healing of both human and nonhuman communities. Robertson uses video and sound as a means of bringing whakapapa, genealogical narratives and care for the ecosystem (kaitiakitanga), to bear on the economic imperatives of the pulp and paper industry. She interrogates the gap created by the colonial or scientific regard of mountains or rivers as ânatural resourcesâ that are out-of-sync with MÄori relations to ancestor-beings.
Robertsonâs current work focuses on the Waiapu River, a tribal polity on the east coast of Aotearoa/New Zealandâs North Island, a waterway near her east coast hapĆ«, which has been degraded as a result of heavy deforestation. However, the three-channel video art installation Uncle TasmanâThe Trembling Current That Scars the Earth (2008â2012) is set in the region of Kawerau, Robertsonâs inland birthplace. The camera frame is steadfastly fixed on an ancestor mountain (PĆ«tauaki, adjacent to Kawerau), a waterfall (Tarawera) and a fumarole at Whakaari (an active island volcano in the Bay of Plenty).
The changing cloud and steam conditions of these sites veil and unveil them, suggesting that they are watched, protected, under the patient gaze of a kaitiaki (spiritual guardian or caretaker). These three places retain their mauri and contain physical reminders, or memories of an adjacent geothermal Lake Rotoitipaku before it became heavily polluted by the activities of the Tasman Pulp and Paper Mill (nicknamed âUncle Tasmanâ by local residents). In NgÄti Tuwharetoaâs accounts, Lake Rotoitipaku, the absent subject of the artwork, is the birthplace of the warrior Tuwharetoa and the burial place of his mother, an important descendent from the Arawa waka (that traveled from Hawaiiki). The spring that welled up in the lake, known as âthe bubble,â is a sacred spring. The lake was well loved by Kawerau inhabitants and was a safe place to swim once the Tarawera River was polluted by the mill. But the calamitous dumping of waste by the Tasman mill from 1968 onwards ended the health of the body of water. The artwork is a memorial to Lake Rotoitipaku. Robertson now des...