Whirling and Looping
PUBLISHED IN:
Ruth Watson: Geophagy
Centre of Contemporary Art (COCA), Christchurch
2018
ISBN : 9780473442323
“The past slides into and out of the present . . . and you are entangled in its whirling and looping.”
‘Could this be it?’, asked my puzzled Uber driver. Google Maps had led us on a confusing detour which wasn’t helped by blinding rays of morning sunlight competing with the pale blue glow of our cell phones. Despite the technical glitch we had in fact found the start of the Bridle Path—a steep narrow track that was the first overland link between the port town of Lyttelton and the settlement of Christchurch. I was there to retrace the steps of my Scottish ancestor James Nicholl, who walked this path in 1866, and also to better understand Ruth Watson’s exhibition Geophagy which, through various artworks, explored the weight of people upon the Earth.In particular, Christchurch and its colonial past is an important aspect within Watson’s video work Unmapping the world. Watson’s Irish ancestors, who are referenced in this work, might have also walked the Bridle Path, together with the wave of European immigrants who arrived in Lyttelton from 1850 onwards. After running up the hill for about 20 minutes, I pause at the top to admire the vast rural and urban patchwork of Christchurch stretching out before me. While admiring the view, the words of my late grandmother came to mind. She said that gaining this view was a significant for James Nicholl. And now I understand: as a Scottish man, who grew up surrounded by death and starvation on a farm in Ireland during the potato famine, beholding this magnificent view of the verdant Canterbury Plains would have signalled the start of a new life filled with possibility.
Inherited memories such as this have an interdimensional quality that can cut through the distance of time in an instant. This particular memory collapsed some 170 years from 1866 to 2017, and affected the way I related to and moved through the landscape. Such memories can also carry other behavioural influences that complicate rather than affirm our lives. Watson illustrates this in Unmapping the world through a family story of Sarah Harvey, her great-great-grandmother, who died while giving birth to her ninth child. The narrator tells us that the medical inquest ‘makes for gruesome reading’ and that Sarah’s eight young children were probably in the home at the time of her death. The memory of this trauma ‘transmitted a fear of having children’ that emanated throughout the family for over a century, finally reaching Watson via her mother and grandmother’s cautionary tales. The memory, we are told, “reached across time like a piece of string that could cut the world in half”.
Ruth Watson, Unmapping the world, 2017. Single channel, looped HD video with sound projector, screen and loungers. 8:51 mins. Photo by Janneth Gil.
This metaphor references an Encyclopedia Britannica illustration, featured earlier in the video, which shows how cartography enables us to get from A to B most efficiently. If we meditate further on the idea of memory traversing time just as we physically navigate space, we might start to unravel the complex whirling and looping of time that renders our choices in life as ‘no choice at all’— similar to what social psychologist Philip Zimbardo once described as a ‘crucible of social forces’ that influences our agency in any given situation.[1] If we shift from a personal to a sociological perspective, we can see agency in time and space become manifold. In particular, if we zoom out from the local colonial context of Christchurch to a global population of 7 billion people, we are confronted with an overwhelming crucible of social forces within which we all play parts. Watson’s expansive installation Geophogy provided a glimpse into the enormity of this crucible by emphasising various examples of global excess—including an excess of memories, information, population, movement and material attachment.
Ruth Watson, Geophagy, 2018 (detail). Installation with recycled pallets, second-hand clothing, monitors with 5-single channel, looped HD videos.
This large-scale sculptural and multichannel video work consisted of stacked wooden pallets overcome by tonnes of second-hand clothing and punctuated by a handful of tube and flat screen monitors. Geophagy also took form in two different spatially responsive configurations: as a Babel-esque tower at the Gus Fisher Gallery and as a labyrinthine field of 2.5-metre high hives at Christchurch’s Centre of Contemporary Art Toi Moroki (CoCA). The installation also included intoning voices that sonically filled both gallery spaces. These voices spoke about towers of knowledge, stacks of content, photos of disaster, images of poor quality, aesthetics of autonomy and civilisations of exponential growth.[2]
Geographer Doreen Massey once said that ‘power, being relationally constructed . . . always has a cartography’.[3] By providing an experience of global excess, Geophagy alluded to the enormity of the cartography of power that Massey discusses. Watson did this by incorporating everyday items, materials and images associated to common activities that gallery visitors could experience affinity with, such as consuming fashion, playing computer games, burning petrol and accumulating digital files.[4] These activities are nodal points within a cartography of power that squeeze the Earth like the hand clasping a rubber stress ball in one of Geophogy’s videos. Eventually, of course, the world will cease to be so elastic. One day Earth will not bounce back.
Massey also argues that time has come to dominate this cartography of power. This is particularly apparent when we use a language of time to classify people and places. A clear example is the rhetoric around ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ nations. This loaded terminology relegates whole countries of people to be living in the developing past rather than in the developed present.[5] More controversially, the same could be said of classifying Alt-right groups as being backward in their thinking. Such classification, Massey claims, excuses us from confronting the fact that ‘we’ are contemporaneous with those we might consider deplorable.[6]
This dominance of time over space is considered further by Watson’s work Transient Global Amnesia. The work depicts street maps that Watson found composting in leaf litter and dissolving into the pavement on the streets of Auckland. As recorded memories of places, the street names, charted roads and landscape contours have physically yielded to the entropic forces of time. The actual city, of course, will eventually find the same fate and with its decay so too will our memories of its buildings, parks and plazas fade with it. Fitting then that ‘transient global amnesia’ is actually a medical term for a neurological condition in which sufferers experience a sudden lapse in memory. Imagine exiting your house one moment and then finding yourself on a street corner without knowledge of your journey in between. Similarly, it occurs to me that it is shockingly hard to remember what life was like getting from A to B with paper maps. Amnesia indeed. Our memories have been swept along in an ever-accelerating flow of digital time lit by the blue glow of cell phone screens that direct and track our every move. Eventually this technology, and our memories of it, will also be rendered frail like the maps and city streets photographed by Watson. As it did for me and my Uber driver when Google couldn’t differentiate our position in relation to the Littleton Tunnel below us. It was the sun that eventually told us where we were by illuminating the Bridle Path in front of us.
Recognising the toxic nature of a time-dominated world, its dehumanisation and decay of memory, led Massey to the understanding that maintaining a global perspective which emphasises a simultaneity of space is key to how we might live with each other and the earth. She writes: ‘If time is the dimension of sequence . . . then space is the dimension of simultaneity, of things, events, people existing at the same moment.’[7] Globally, we might figuratively and literally exist in different time zones, but we still share a simultaneity of space. In this sense, the simultaneity encouraged by Watson’s exhibition Geophagy references the heart of our contemporary global condition—a condition that we, in Aotearoa New Zealand, are very much part of and responsible for. Within this responsibility we perhaps have an opportunity to resist the forces that render everyone subject to the systems, memories and histories we have all inherited.
Just moments earlier I was gazing upon an incredible vista and now all I can comprehend is a grey urban static. I am on the cityside of the Bridle Path, which terminates in a semi-commercial/residential area bisected by a busy motorway. I do not even have a footpath to walk on as 18-wheeler trucks hurtle past me only an arm’s length away. My assumption was that this exercise would affirm my identity, but instead it has left me resonating more with being lost in the whirling and looping as expressed in Watson’s artwork. It is overwhelming to realise that I am the direct product of empire expansion—its propaganda, its atrocities, and its ongoing project under the auspices of capitalism and neoliberalism—that has led to this abrasive urban occupation of the land. For Pākehā (New Zealand Europeans), such as Watson and myself, it is important to claim some responsibility for our part in this cartography of power. More generally, it is important that we all recognise that our obligation to fellow humans and the Earth starts at a local and a personal level in a simultaneity of space with others. This is a responsibility that first requires understanding your attachment to the world and knowing just how ethically complex the crucible of social forces makes you.
[1]Philip Zimbardo,The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Random House Trade Paperbacks, New York, 2008,p 211.
[2]The recorded voices I mention play as audio tracks in the videos nestled within the installation. Each video’s audio recites a portion of a specific published text. For a list of these texts please see page XX.
[3]Doreen Massey, ‘Spatial Justice: Radical Foundations’, a workshop organised by Professors Chantal Mouffe and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos at the University of Westminster, London,19 November 2011. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFIpcfl4pEA, accessed 22 May 2018.
[4]Fashion: The consumption of fashion was addressed not just in the use of second-hand clothing but also through associated events at CoCA. Computer games: one of Geophagy’s videos features footage of the online computer game Candy Crush. Petrol: in the recitation of Schuppli’s text the politics of petrochemical extraction is discussed at length. Digital files: one of Geophagy’s videos features footage of a stream of IMG files scrolling across a computer screen and further discussion of the digital is featured in the recitation of Steyerl’s text.
[5]Massey, ‘Spatial Justice: Radical Foundations’,
[6]As above.
[7]Doreen Massey, ‘Taking on the World’, Geography, vol 99, iss 1. Spring 2014, p 38.