However, the communication of a personal narrative via text felt on reflection like an uncomfortable appropriation of the landscape; through this process a visual hierarchy was set up, in that meaning was conferred to the land in the space of the frame only through the overlay of written English language. It is important to note that my lived experience is not only not that of someone indigenous to Aotearoa, I also do not have any direct familial connections to the settler history of that country; arriving myself in the late 1980s from the heart of Empire, and as such always occupying the farthest reaches of the “hyphen between colonizer-indigene” (Denzin, Lincoln and Smith, 2008). Thus the intentions of the film to “place” a series of events into the body of a landscape risk inflicting further violence through a decentring of the trauma of colonisation. My approach to representation of the landscape, through static, picturesque camera viewpoints that accidentally repeated the colonising gaze, inscribed into tropes of Western landscape painting and photography a “flexible mode of representation that served a range of strategic purposes including naturalizing the position of the colonial settler” (Mitchell, 1994). Despite the stitching together of word and image through transitions and overlays in the piece, the gaps between buried layers of meaning personal to myself and any real form of understanding on the part of the viewer remained unbridged.

Context & Methods

In response to what I perceived as the unintended perpetuation of colonising impulses and stereotypes in my previous work, I trialled new strategies for production. My goals were to de-centre any autoethnographic impulses in the work, while continuing to acknowledge the situated and lived experience that informs my own cultural context. I also aimed to develop new approaches to experimental film-making that would not be paralysed by what Erica Balsom has referred to as the “pedagogy of suspicion” (Balsom, 2017) that has accompanied much of the dialogue around documentary representation in the context of postmodern photo-filmic practice, but would instead respond by attempting to “revive key elements of the observational mode while challenging the epistemological claims that historically accompanied it through strategies of partiality, blockage, and opacity” (Balsom, 2017). The specific context for beginning this development in my work was the long-term appropriation of Ngāti Rangi tribal lands for use by the Crown; specifically for energy generation through a hydro-electric scheme and for Ministry of Defence training purposes. I made repeated visits to the community, working alongside them to create a collaborative educational partnership with the institution in which I worked. In responding to these experiences through the act of making lens-based work, I separated out for development several distinct strands of practice, and tested them in my next body of work, Tongariro Power.

The first strand involved the overt appropriation of found archival material, re-working the triumphal and pioneering visual language of documentaries from the mid-20th century in order to make explicit the embedded settler, colonising and gendered narratives through surrealist and satirical tropes of montage and decontextualised re-presentation of the material. Campbell and Durden write that “Photography’s esthetic captures very well the reflective sheen of the surfaces of capital’s culture; indeed it helps to create it” (Campbell and Durden, 2019). In appropriating imagery from propagandist government-sponsored film-making my aim was to “intervene at the surface of this allure”, through the various uses of large-scale projections of fragments of footage, the abstraction of sound and film speed and the recontextualization of single frames into new narrative structures within accompanying zine-format artist books (Figs 3-5).

The second methodology was developed as a process by which I as a filmmaker could “understand the landscape as a somatic place” (Pearson, 2010). After initial research was undertaken into the specific site and its context, I adapted an aspect of Situationist practice through undertaking the dèrive as method to travel through the environment. My adaptation of this method includes the explicit understanding that I operate from the coloniser-indigene hyphen, and in working in this way I invoke the Kaupapa Māori approaches delineated by Dr. Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, sourced from Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonising Methodologies text (Smith, 2021).

These can be stated as:

Aroha ki te tangata/Love for the people

Kanohi kitea/The seen face, or present yourself face to face

Titiro, whakarongo..korero/Look, listen….speak

Manaaki ki te tangata/Share and be a host, be generous

Kia tupato/Be cautious

Kaua e takahia te mana o te tangata/Do not trample over the mana of the people

Kia mahaki/Don’t flaunt your knowledge

When in the environment I am watchful for Jungian synchronicities or meaningful coincidences, and through observing these events I am also acknowledging the practices of Mātauranga Māori, careful observations of signs and symbols of the natural world that feed into rich and complex web of indigenous intergenerational knowledge. Jung’s rewording of synchronicity as a “rupture of time” (McGuire & Hull 1978: 230) also aligns with Māori understanding of time as non-linear:

Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua: ‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past’

(Māori whakatauki or proverb)

Respectfully, on foot with camera and audio recorder, I am open to what is offered up by the place. This includes photo-filmic responses to the landscape, aural responses to sound and also sometimes the collection of an artifact for further photographic and sculptural enquiry in the studio space. This fieldwork aligns with the embodied camera, with its limitations and possibilities described by Bridget Crone as she discusses the work of Charlotte Prodger (Crone, 2020). Camera movements are the products of necessity; as a lone camera operator with limited equipment the camera takes up the “view from a body” (Haraway, 1998), which works in contrast to the Cartesian authoritative God-eye view from above.

Outcomes

An Age of Iron represents my first attempt to synthesise these methodological strands of practice into a single experimental film. The work asks the audience to consider land rights, resource extraction, ownership, and our relationships with more-than-human materials and place. Tahāroa is a tiny settlement to the South-West of the Kawhia harbor, in the North Island of Aotearoa. Some iwi (tribes) and hapu (sub-tribes) are looking at arrangements with corporations as sources of revenue as well as opportunities to retain aspects of their kaitiakitanga (guardianship) of whenua (land) and cultural protocols. N.Z Steel first brokered an agreement with local tribe Ngāti Mahuta ki te Hauāuru in the 70’s to extract the titanomagnetite from the sands and ship it offshore for use in the construction of steel. Tucked out of sight, over the headland, the dredging operation of this iron-ore extraction from the volcanic black sands of the foreshore has been continuing unabated for over 50 years. In making the film I undertook to offer voice to that sand, to that foreshore, to those waves. This film asks what prolonged mineral extraction and the re-introduction of that material into the global manufacturing chain might mean for the mauri (or spirit) of the land, and for our planetary relationships.

The construction and structural elements of the film attempt to respond to Balsom’s call for a renewed utilization of observational modes of film-making that also employ deliberate occlusions and disruptions of the indexical plane of vision as strategies to challenge “the epistemological claims that historically accompanied it” (2017). Creating space for the viewer to navigate these partial revelations, I removed any intertitles. I appropriated and created digital fragments from various archives, taking on the role of what artist Fiona Jack has referred to as “guerilla historian” (Jack, 2013). Ship tracker data shows the slow progress of the Taharoa Destiny and other barges as they traverse the Moana Pacific (Pacific Ocean) with their ore cargo to their destinations on the Chinese mainland. Much of this ore is smelted into aluminium to feed the ongoing construction boom there and beyond. I have interrupted the more cinematic views of the landscape with screen grabs gathered from a citizen website broadcast from Beijing charting worker accidents and deaths on construction sites across the Chinese provinces. Through these interventions I am attempting to allude to othered and other-than-human narrative voices; those of the local mine workers, the Chinese labourers on construction sites, the iron-sands and the ocean that connects them (Figs 6 & 7). The insertion of animated symbols (miners’ housing, abandoned tyres) wheel down and across the observational footage in another act of disruptive opacity. Two further animated elements refer to non-Western cosmologies, to time and space travel in relation to Polynesian mythologies and to the elemental/asteroidal nature of the ore itself (Fig. 8). In this work I have departed from observational sound, commissioning a more cinematic score that emphasises the dystopian elements of this profoundly traumatised Anthropenic landscape.