Seismic media: art and geological co-creation in Ōtautahi Christchurch,Aotearoa New Zealand

Geological media/mediating geology

When does an earthquake end? Or, how long does an earthquake last? Growing up in Aotearoa New Zealand means being aware of our place in the Pacific Ring of Fire, knowing that the Alpine Fault along the length of the South Island is overdue for a roll of its shoulders. Despite this, the earthquakes that happened in Ōtautahi Christchurch, were not what we expected – tearing across unknown faults, first deep in the gravel, and then under hard volcanic rock. The sequence was triggered by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake west of the city on 4 September 2010, and magnified by the more violent 6.3 aftershock on 22 February 2011, is ongoing and complex, including more than 20,000 quakes to date. ¹ The February 2011 aftershock destroyed much of the central city; caused widespread damage to infrastructure and lasting trauma; loss of life, homes and livelihoods; reclaimed wetlands under houses and transformed brick into rubble. Creative responses to this upheaval also transformed the city, as the central business district evolved from broken buildings, to gravel-lined gaps, to ‘transitional’ sites for creative place-making, and more recently back towards a collection of seismically-attentive buildings. ²

Recovery in Ōtautahi Christchurch has involved a negotiation with dynamic geologies, as the city contended with the continual dynamism of the earth and uncertainty over what could be constructed upon it. Residents, city planners and artists all developed new tools for how to live in this instability. Between February 22, 2011 and June 2013 central city blocks were cordoned off, excluding all but demolition workers from the remains of shops, businesses, studios and homes. Unable to reach the centre, residents walked the edges, skirting the cordon to trace the shape and feel of their missing city (Figure 1). ³

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Figure 1.

Simon Pope and Zita Joyce, Netwalking. Artist-led public walk around the red zone cordon, Friday 28 March 2013. Photo: Susan Ballard.

In the gaps where buildings had been, artists and new transitional organisations generated new performative and aesthetic places where people could begin to reinhabit their city. ⁴ Transitional architectural and rebuilding practices appeared – including Japanese architect Shigeru Ban’s design gift to the city of a ‘Cardboard Cathedral’; a transitional festival of architectural intervention; and evolving forms of grass-roots and temporary civic decoration such as flowers placed in road cones. The transitional became a definition for the time span of the city’s demolition, planning and rebuilding. It became a framework for understanding how to live in the unstable city in the years during and after the quakes, in two ways. For the governing bodies the transitional city is simply the phase that marks the time between the known past and a planned future city, ⁵ but for many of the organisations developed in response to the earthquakes, the transitional city is a temporal and spatial process of exploration towards an emergent city. Writing in the introduction to the 2012 publication Christchurch: The Transitional City Pt 4, performer and writer George Parker and urban strategist Barnaby Bennett explicitly argue that the post-quake period was just the most recent, fourth, transition in the city’s history following the arrival of Māori, the 19th century European colonisation and construction of the ‘garden city’, then its post-World War Two suburban expansion. ⁶ In the post-colonial city these are understood as cumulative categories, not replacements. Parker and Bennett locate the transitional in the multiple crises facing the current global socio-historical moment. ⁷ The earthquakes initiated a local crisis, in which the transitional defines a movement away from the known concrete past of the city, from the memories attached to buildings and pathways suddenly erased, and towards uncertainty, speculative creative practices and experimentation. Added to the geo-social transformations of the city embraced by the transitional, the earthquakes also left parts of the city more vulnerable to sea level rise due to climate change. ⁸ The seismic dynamism of Ōtautahi Christchurch created a transitional geo-sociality that was practiced through speculative placemaking, collective memory and uncertain futures, negotiated in spaces of upheaval amidst the greater crises of the Anthropocene.

In their exploration of geo-social relationships within the Anthropocene, Nigel Clark and Yasmin Gunaratnam suggest that living with, and understanding the human as part of, geology also means thinking about ‘the geologic as a dynamic and excessive subtending of human life’. ⁹ In this essay we extend this notion of geo-social relations to unpack what it might mean to live with seismicity, where the dynamic geologies of the earth have reasserted their agencies, and where creative practices are a means for a more-than-human collaboration with the earth. From our perspectives from within the disciplines of media, art history and environmental humanities, we add to this an energetic understanding of media: as a very particular kind of geoaesthetics co-created with the seismic. ¹⁰ For this we draw on Harriet Hawkins’ definition of geoaesthetics that brings together environmental understanding of place with art practices. ¹¹ For Hawkins, geoaesthetics includes ‘sensory experiences of that which is not visible, or not easily and generally visible to humans — the underground’. ¹² Seismic media articulate the sensory energies of the underground, drawing on the unstable earth as medium, mediating seismicity between the earth and humans, expressed in texts, objects and practices.

In Ōtautahi Christchurch, the spaces of the city became a cultural and creative environment in which art and media were bound up with their very seismicity. This essay discusses specific examples of seismic media in Ōtautahi Christchurch, focusing on the five unstable years following February 2011. Some of the projects were instigated by the co-authors, and others we participated in or observed, as a resident of and visitor to Ōtautahi Christchurch. We begin with a prehistory of seismic media. We then trace seismic media in Ōtautahi Christchurch through relational and creative placemaking practices that involve layerings of memory and sound, and close encounters with geological forces. Here we map instances within a whole earthquake experience, from the moment the faultline ruptures, through the long engagement with loss and memory that emerges from it. The art practices documented here mediate fragments of that experience in sound, touch, image, memory and emotion. We end with a discussion of an artwork that points to a larger rupture: that of the colonial city itself, and the possibilities that seismic media open up for learning to live within a dynamic post-colonial city in collaboration with the planet.

A prehistory of seismic media

Seismic media is a particular geoaesthetic mediation of geology. In Ōtautahi Christchurch seismic media describes a relationship between art, media and geology in the quake-damaged city that is both embodied and political; it points towards an environmental and geographical understanding of disaster recovery in which learning to live in place is connected to cycles of memory and renewal. ¹³

Seismic media is not new, nor specific to Ōtautahi Christchurch. It has a long history and certain precedents can be traced. Most famously, the 8.5 magnitude earthquake in November 1755, known as the great Lisbon earthquake, has been credited with causing a seismic shift in people’s understanding of the world. ¹⁴ New forms of media were created as poetry, philosophy and art mapped ‘shudders of horror’ ¹⁵ across Europe resulting in a seismic philosophical and scientific transformation. Lisbon provides a critical prehistory to how we mobilise seismic media in the context of Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Voltaire, Kant, Adorno and Serres have all written about Lisbon as an earthquake that shifted not only the land but also the way humans imagined and located themselves culturally and socially within a city. ¹⁶ In many texts, the Lisbon earthquake is connected to the creation of new media: new forms of poetry and prose, as well as images that documented both experience and trauma. Lisbon has remained central to discourses of modernity, but as de Medeiros reminds us, it was also a specific and particular experience for the Portuguese people. ¹⁷ The earthquake itself enacted a form of seismic media: the relationship between humans, their city, their art, were now the result of a new knowledge of the ground upon which they stood. Although there have been many other earthquakes, with devastating impacts on people and place, the Lisbon earthquake played a foundational and critical role in shifting European understandings about human relationships with disaster and recovery. Of this, Nigel Clark writes that ‘More than just a matter of scale, it was the dynamism that revealed itself’ in Lisbon. ¹⁸ The Lisbon earthquake shifted fixed definitions of nature – the earth was now geological, dynamic and mobile.

More than this, for many European thinkers the Lisbon earthquake challenged the work of God and the empire-building colonial dreams of the Portuguese nation were put on hold. ¹⁹ Its magnitude and location meant that this ‘natural event’ had massive and ongoing political and social impacts. We know so much about the earthquake in Lisbon because of the colonising powers of the Church; its centralised organisation and its distributed surveyors. ²⁰ Maria do Rosário Themundo Barata details how extensive surveys were sent to all parish priests, and data was gathered in the immediate aftermath of the quake that relied on the global reach of the clergy; reports from Brazil indicated that clerics there experienced the impacts of the tsunami. ²¹ The media response was immediate. Images proliferated, more often the result of media reports than firsthand experience. ²² In one, a coloured woodcut printed in a leaflet circulated in the immediate aftermath by Johann Caspar Pflauntz of Augsburg, we watch safely from a spot above the Tagus River. Caught in this dramatic and emotional moment we witness the future being made, as citizens of the burning city take to the waters, only to be swamped by tsunami. Over 100 years later, circulated images continued to reproduce disaster layered on top of disaster. Georg Ludwig Hartwig’s illustration ‘The Earthquake at Lisbon in 1755’ (1887) shows the water sucked out of the port area revealing a seabed containing layer upon layer of rubbish, long forgotten shipwrecks possessing the lost treasures of colonisation, and the waste remains of a large bustling city.

As evidenced in the texts written at the time, the Lisbon earthquake challenged established emotional connections with place and introduced new elemental understandings of geology. ²³ Media and nature became inextricably linked. Many new methods for mapping the natural elements of the planet resulted, and a new sense of scale emerged.

Media theorist Douglas Kahn has described how earthquakes are monumental energies felt as ‘acoustical waves move through the earth and move the ground’. ²⁴ Lisbon was a cultural revolution formed as the ground moved; monumental energies resulted in the production of new artforms that contained new ‘human’ expressions. These seismic media functioned as a material record of disaster at the same time as they drew a map of a future city. This brings us closer to our definition of seismic media. The experiences recorded in Lisbon demonstrate that a connection between environment, geology and people is heightened when the very ground upon which they meet is shifting; when the subterranean erupts through the surface of the earth. The concept of seismic media describes this particular ‘ungrounding’ of media produced by earthquakes. ²⁵ Conjuring up new spaces and ways of being in the city, seismic media offers an expanded idea of living in the aftermath of disaster: as media and experience reflect new ways of knowing and being in the place where the earthquakes occurred. In thinking about how to pay attention to both the inhuman media histories of the earth and the geo-social understandings of this media, media scholar Sean Cubitt argues for a critical political strategy that traces inequity to previous colonisations of the environment. ²⁶ For Cubitt, this is ecomedia, defined both as the media through which humans understand their environment, and the environment within which media occur. These new modes of communication together with the ways we perceive the world around us, challenge previously held ‘distinction[s] between human and environment’. ²⁷ However, this raises a series of geo-social problems that also need to be addressed. Energies do not course through bodies evenly, and unequal distributions of power and place that are already present in a colonial city, mean that ecomedia is not so easily deployed when it mixes with the racialised histories of geology and city-building. In A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None geographer Kathryn Yusoff traces the racism that remains at the foundation of geology. ²⁸ Yusoff suggests that one strategy to redress the ‘white core’ of geology is to unpack the European foundations of the category of the inhuman. ²⁹ Yusoff invites an attentiveness to how different ‘histories of the earth provide a break in analysis and narratives of material relations and languages’; to do so opens the possibility to ‘make histories that launch a praxis for an insurgent geology into being’. ³⁰ This praxis is one based in a recognition of multiple agencies, multiple constitutions of the body.

Seismic co-creation: mediating the unsettled space-between

Ōtautahi Christchurch’s earthquake sequence began with a 7.1 magnitude earthquake to the west of the city on September 4, 2010. It was unexpected, a tremendous upheaval that broke chimneys and masonry, but in striking at 4:35am it spared lives. In the next few months the ground kept moving, but we thought the worst had passed – we couldn’t know we were just in-between. To think about what it meant to be living within this newly, surprisingly, seismic time, we organised ‘The Sound of the Underground: Earthquakes Music and Art’, a public lecture and performance event at The Physics Room contemporary art space, four floors up, surrounded by precarious brick buildings, but housed in a former Post Office built with serious solidity in the aftermath of the 1931 Napier earthquake. At the event, Douglas Kahn presented an excerpt from his book Earth Sound Earth Signal in which he reflected on his own experiences of seismicity in Seattle, and local sound artist Bruce Russell performed ‘Under the Volcano: a live electro-acoustic sonata’.

The sound of the underground is noisy. The performance and lecture took us underground, to feel the seismic energies of the earthquake. Kahn described his memories of Seattle, when ‘the ground itself became acoustic, with swelling waves traveling down through the road’, ³¹ a realisation about the closeness of bodily knowledge to the movements of the earth, an earth epiphany, what sound artist Pauline Oliveros names a ‘geophany’. ³² Many descriptions of earthquakes in remote places emphasise the roaring and rumbling of the earth, as in another major South Island earthquake, in Murchison on 17 June 1929. ³³ This event ‘created sounds in the area of greatest destruction [that were] deafening and of extreme loudness, creating as great panic as the earthquake itself. Most observers described them as tremendous subterranean explosions. At Nelson, about 85 kilometres from Murchison, the sounds resembled the whistling and rush of wind’. ³⁴ In this time immediately after the September 2010 quakes, we reflected on the shock of its sound in the night; its thunderous roar and the unnerving silence that followed.

For ‘Under the Volcano: a live electro-acoustic sonata’, Bruce Russell evoked the sound and the power of the earthquake, remediating that intensity of experience through a metal drum and the bodies of the audience. He connected the sound to the extinct volcano in which he lives – forming Whakaraupō Lyttelton Harbour over the Port Hills from Ōtautahi Christchurch. Russell threaded reel-to-reel tape across two machines playing sonic quake recordings from Lyttleton. In a concantation of chemical, electrical and physical processes Russell attached a contact microphone to the outside of a 44 gallon drum (see Figure 2). As the drum rolled back and forward there was a sense that Russell was gathering forces beyond those in the room, forces beyond those contained within the drum, forces beyond the gathered people and a foreboding of the earthquake yet to come, centred in those hills in the gap between Ōtautahi Christchurch and Whakaraupō Lyttelton Harbour.

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Figure 2.

Bruce Russell, Under the Volcano: a live electro-acoustic sonata, Physics Room Contemporary Art Gallery, 15 December 2011. Photo: Zita Joyce.

Looking back, the time between 4 September 2010 and 22 February 2011 is invested with foreshadowing; the ground remained unstable, but it seemed the worst was over. After ‘February’, the old Post Office building remained strong, but everything around it was destroyed. In that space-between, Kahn and Russell connected the audience to the seismic events our bodies were experiencing, in elemental ways. Bringing together body energies with critical and artistic understandings of media, a co-creation of thought and sound with the unstable earth, these works propelled us into the next phase of the earthquake cycle, a more unsettled process of trying to understand and live within a transforming environment.

Earth sounds and seismic energies: mediating the rocks

That change happened suddenly, and noisily, as strong volcanic rocks under the Port Hills between Ōtautahi Christchurch and Whakaraupō Lyttelton ruptured at 12.51pm on 22 February 2011. Waves of energy travelled from the rupture towards the central city, layers of earth moving against each other in a trampolining effect producing short, severe, vertical shaking up to 2.2× gravity in places along the movement of the waves. ³⁵ On the city side of the rupture, ground tore apart, liquified and buckled, breaking pipes below and buildings above. ³⁶ Along the hills, on city and harbour sides, over 6,000 large fragments of Miocene basalt and trachyte lava and scoria dislodged and tumbled downwards. ³⁷ The movements of earth and rocks changed the form of the city and hills, and the ways people could live and move through that landscape. But these transformations also produced artworks and forms of humour, as people attempted to mediate the experience and its aftermath.

On both sides of the hills, the ground became a participant in the everyday lives of people. Seismic energies were tied to new ways of knowing the environment, and new ways of cohabiting with it; and there was a great enthusiasm to share this with others, and people took to familiar media to explain their experiences. Just a few days after the quake, gardener Andrew Gee modelled the process of liquefaction in a video uploaded to YouTube: beginning in his backyard rose garden he layered mud into a wheelbarrow and bounced it vigorously along a lumpy cobbled driveway. Suddenly what seemed to be solid was liquid again, and Gee calmly explained, ‘this is why the buildings are falling down’. This mediation of seismic effects was intended to ‘show to a few friends what we were living upon and what came out of the ground’, but was widely viewed and shared as a way to explain the experience of living with seismicity. ³⁸

Many fallen rocks were immortalised in images that travelled across New Zealand and out to major newspapers and news aggregators around the world. One in particular epitomises the everyday humour with which the earthquake experience could be mediated. Phil Johnson listed a boulder that answered to the name of ‘Rocky’ on online auction site TradeMe under the category ‘home living - outdoor garden conservatory - landscaping materials’ (Figure 3). ‘Rocky’ had ended up in Johnson’s garage in Heathcote in the Port Hills. The seven photographs of the 25–30 tonne new landscaping mimicked the familiar genre of online auction images. Johnston included documentation of damage to the rock including one side coated with a thick layer of white concrete dust and another badly scuffed corner. These seeping moments of authenticity added to the seduction of an online purchase.

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Figure 3.

Phil Johnson, ‘Landscape Rocks for Sale in ChCh’ Closed Monday 7 March, 11:40 am 2011. Trade Me Listing #: 357989041 <https://www.trademe.co.nz/home-living/outdoor-garden-conservatory/landscaping-materials/stones-rocks/auction-357989041.htm>.

News media accounts also focused on small moments of cohabitation between humans and geology. Eighty year old Betty McGrail was photographed sitting in her favourite chair in her lounge room beside an unnamed large volcanic boulder ( Figure 4). Betty had left her Heathcote house during the quakes. She said that the boulders ‘came down the hill fast, bouncing. They came from everywhere with a “boom, boom, boom.” When I went back to my house this big boulder was in the sitting room. It’s sitting there quite nicely, like it’s happy to be there’. Resting on a little pile of gravel on Betty’s dark red Axminster carpet the boulder dominates over half of photojournalist Sarah Ivey’s widely circulated press image. Betty sits beside it. Her hands clasped, she perches just to the front of her chair; beside the rock but not companionable. Her chair has been turned towards the camera, and under her neat machine-knitted blue skirt, Betty’s red gumboots are dusty.

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Figure 4.

‘Betty McGrail wants to get rid of this boulder’. Photo Sarah Ivey, New Zealand Herald 7 March 2011.

Photographed, these twin boulders from the volcanic harbour entered into a web of images that comprised a broader visual and media context for the earthquakes. As geological materials given personality, and turned into images in circulation, they were shared because of their connection between people and place. Like the liquefaction documented in a wheelbarrow, these rocks became geological solids that for a time broke free from the ground.

Sound and sensory media artist Jo Burzynska recorded some of the rock storm the earthquake rained down on Lyttelton, over the hills from Heathcote. Running from her home after the main shaking died down she left a recording device on her doorstep, which captured the sounds of massive seismic energy release: her own house being thrown around, the crashing of rocks dislodged by seismic waves, and then responses of birds, people and building alarms. From this Burzynska assembled a soundscape for performance at the Lines of Flight Festival of Experimental Music a month later, using the immediate earthquake sounds and others from the unsettled time that followed, including rocks still falling, demolitions and the background percussion of ever-present helicopters against the pervasive, anxious silence. That bare soundscape became a new work renamed Body Waves (2012) for performance with Australian sound artist Malcolm Riddoch.

‘Body Waves’ are the primary and secondary seismic waves that comprise an earthquake, and also describe the effect of the performance piece itself. In Body Waves Burzynska played an untreated seismic soundscape, and Riddoch tuned the acoustic energy to the resonant frequencies of the performance space – bouncing the acoustic waves around the room. This included infrasonic waves, in the range below 20 Hz, so that the performance of Body Waves translated the captured audible sound of earthquakes, and reconstructed the inaudible, creating a new set of waves, some heard and some physically felt. To be inside the work was to experience in sound something of the all-encompassing audio experience of the quakes, the roaring, thunderous, crashing, the rending and settling of rock.

This new experience of the instability of rocks became central to a major work by Australian artists David Haines and Joyce Hinterding. It began with images and recordings made in the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetū, in December 2011 when it was closed to the public for seismic base isolation amidst the early sequence of aftershocks. ³⁹ In this time of quiet after the Gallery had been used as a Civil Defence base, they described the sense of the art ‘institution being put into a deep freeze’. ⁴⁰ Initially uncertain about how to approach their gleanings and also respect the seismic experience of the city, Haines and Hinterding began to think about the deep time energies of geology evoked by their electromagnetic recordings. In the resulting interactive installation Geology (2015, Figure 5), the electromagnetic sounds of the empty gallery are transposed onto floating rocks released by unseen forces, as Haines and Hinterding collapsed distinctions between geology and media.

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Figure 5.

(a) and (b) Joyce Hinterding and David Haines Geology (2015) real-time 3D environment, 2× HD projections, game engine, motion sensor, spatial 3D audio. Commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, supported by Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetu, Christchurch New Zealand. Reproduced with permission of the artists.

To interact with Geology a participant stands on a circle immersed within the sonic space of the gallery. Gestures and movements read by a Microsoft Kinect motion controller launch the participant across an alpine landscape denuded of plant life; populated by floating white cubes containing multidimensional unfolding spaces filled with gravity-defying rocks. The experience of Haines and Hinterding’s work is far from that of the earthquake, yet it brings together the body, movement, sensation and geology. Haines and Hinterding create a seismic media formed from the knowledge of a dynamic earth. Geology is a destabilising and meditative flight through the earth works of geological time, like the everyday experience of living within a seismically active environment, it is occasionally shattered by moments of upheaval. Inside the world of Geology, conceptually prospecting for minerals, moving among and between the geological surfaces of the planet, evokes the material limits of a human body. Occupying the interactive spaces within Geology is not just about being on and above the ground, but understanding how energies transmit and move through material layers.

An emergent city: mediating transitions in time and space

While the September 2010 quake changed the city’s narrative, 22 February 2011 cast an immediate line between past and future, a ‘rupture’ in the city’s history and memory. ⁴¹ It shook down walls and required new ways of being, living in broken homes and moving around a changing city space. ⁴² Many art and cultural practices mediated the effects of seismicity on the lived environment, how the earthquakes impacted the spaces of the city and the memories layered there. While the ground still shook the city required constant renegotiation in the process of moving from place to place. Cordons created a navigational hole in the CBD for more than 2 years, and fences and shipping containers routed traffic around damaged buildings long after that. The known became unstable, remapped with new media tools that reflect the elasticity of time: the unfurling of tens of thousands of earthquakes in the ‘Christchurch Quake Map’ (Figure 6); changing boundaries of the central city in a series of ‘Cordon Reduction Maps’; open street maps of water, petrol, power and re-figured common areas; maps that documented civic or political processes being stamped onto the city – zoning that determined whether houses would be cleared away or rebuilt; the Draft Plans and Blueprint that drew and redrew the central city; and iterations of community projects. ⁴³

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Figure 6.

(a) and (b) Paul Nicholls, Christchurch Quake Map, screen grab, Tuesday 22 February 2011, <https://www.christchurchquakemap.co.nz/>.

In the new public spaces appearing in the city, projects arose from a new sense of possibility that emerged as rubble was cleared away; a way of thinking about community and creative engagement with the city’s recovery that came to define Christchurch as a transitional city. ⁴⁴ In the space between the quakes, the creative collective Gap Filler filled a single gap between buildings with film and performance, and social collective Greening the Rubble created a public park on the rubble of a cleared demolition site, lined with lawn, plants and seating made from bricks that were chimneys just a few months earlier. ⁴⁵ Afterwards, as the city came down and the gaps spread, the projects did too: village fair, book fridge, Dance-o-Mat, films, poetry, gap golf, chess, crochet, petanque and plants emerging from the rubble. These were community-initiated open spaces, experimental and grassroots artistic initiatives and culture-led regeneration initiatives that co-created a new sense of the city with its seismicity. ⁴⁶ Without buildings, these were spaces to gather outside, to remember what was lost, imagine what could be, and experience a new pleasure in the transitional space in between.

Media artists and archivists created projects that engaged with layers of memory gathered over time, before the quakes, and into the empty spaces left behind. They mediated the seismic as a rupture in the city’s history. ⁴⁷ High Street Stories (2011–ongoing, Heritage New Zealand) documents people, buildings and moments in the long history of the now largely demolished Edwardian High Street precinct; Sound Sky (2013, Trudy Lane and Halsey Bergund) – (see Figure 7) asked users to share memories, recordings of the present and hopes for the future, creating a responsive map to layer the past, present and future, accessed through a smartphone app; the temporary tactile map work Lost Oscillations (2015, Dugal McKinnon, Jim Murphy and Mo Zareei) invited people to conjure up voices and sounds from previous decades of the city, radio recordings from times and spaces that have been erased by urban change accelerated by the quakes; The Stadium Broadcast (2014, Field Theory), also drew on radio recordings, interviews and audience contributions to piece together the history of the now demolished stadium at Lancaster Park, transmitting the past across the city, in an electromagnetic layer over the present. ⁴⁸ Of all these transitional and temporary works, only High St stories remains. The rest were as transitional as the city at the time, creating spaces for reflection and memory that didn’t exist in physical space – using media technologies to conjure images, voices and other sounds from the past into moments of the present.

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Figure 7.

Trudy Lane and Halsey Burgund, Sound Sky, 2013, screen grab, <http://soundsky.org/>.

Sally McIntyre’s radio work as Radio Cegeste 104.5FM hovers in this space of memory, briefly populating physical spaces with a spectral past. Her transmitter translates the acoustic energy of silent sites into electromagnetic energy, radio waves that are shifting and imperfect, difficult to receive clearly, prone to interference, like memory itself. Two of McIntyre’s works have particular resonance in the space opened up by the earthquake, as they use electromagnetic energy to displace, translate and reinterpret the sounds and silences of post-Quake Christchurch; a mediation of the after effects of the seismic.

In the personal performance memorial ‘A private swamp / was where this tree grew feathers once’, McIntyre used a simple mini FM transmitter to record the interior spaces of houses she had previously lived in. ⁴⁹ The recordings were ritualistically framed, exercises in close listening, observing the movements of a building, its acoustic qualities and the silence beyond it. On the 2nd of January 2012, she transmitted the sounds of those houses all at once into one of them – one chosen because after 41 aftershocks in the preceding 24 hours it felt most stable. ⁵⁰ McIntyre described the work as a ritual of releasing layers of memory, ghosts and the remains of these spaces that once sheltered her, one of which had been reduced to rubble. The work was a radio memorial, a ‘mobile to hang invisibly in the air’, and a process of reclaiming the earthquake experience. ⁵¹ McIntyre layered spaces and the times of memory and recording, into a single long meditative moment: a moment that was full of the anticipation of its own end – the fear that another wave of seismic energy would finally bring down the walls around her.

In After Bexley, McIntyre and musician Reuben Derrick recorded the silence of a subdivision abandoned because of the earthquakes. Bexley was built on barely reclaimed wetland in the early 2000s, and severely damaged in the 2011 earthquake. ⁵² Even in September 2012, the recorded sound of Bexley was silence, but also articulated nature’s return in the acoustic spaces of the houses – silt piled heavily in rooms after exploding through the floor, the wetland seeping back upwards, plant life regenerating. There are multiple silences here. There is the sound of a house filled by earth from below, with sides open to the elements; a house that no longer offers complete, secure shelter; creating aeolian sounds of its own. Beyond the houses there is another, unbounded, silence. In the absence of the expected sounds of suburban life, there are distant rumbles of cars on the motorway and honking wetland birds. In playing back these non-sounds, ‘the silence bursts its banks’, moving from one space into another. ⁵³

By bringing together memory, place and seismicity, these artworks both engage with the effects of the earthquake and respect its impact. They engage with histories of the city, integrating the past into the post-quake present and future. They also reflect the new geological expertise of living in a seismic city. Earthquakes have happened here before, but not in this way: able to be mediated by new technologies of recording, storage and transmission.

Mediating a deeper rupture

Memory and transition are old concepts, however, for a settler society still coming to terms with the instability wrought by colonialism, and in particular the 1840s rupture of long Ngāi Tahu settlement and use of the land on which Christchurch was built. ⁵⁴ Historian Katie Pickles argues that among the ruptures caused by the quakes, in the city’s ‘break from the colonial past’, Māori have been ‘officially and fundamentally involved in the rebuilding of the city’. ⁵⁵ Integral to the building of a new city, local Iwi Ngāi Tahu have become major landowners following the 1998 Ngāi Tahu Settlement Act, with a central role taken by Ngāi Tūāhuriri as the hapū that holds mana whenua over an area that includes Ōtautahi Christchurch. ⁵⁶ To articulate this in the process of rebuilding the city, the hapū’s charitable trust Matapopore provides ‘cultural advice on Ngāi Tūāhuriri / Ngāi Tahu values, narratives and aspirations for the anchor projects and any other projects associated with the regeneration of Ōtautahi / Christchurch’. ⁵⁷ Matapopore is working to ensure that amidst this new transition the city expresses the hapū’s ‘identity, culture and narratives’ within and around the major building and public space projects, to create a place ‘in which Ngāi Tūāhuriri, Christchurch residents and visitors all feel comfortable, included and connected, all have a place to stand’ to a greater extent than the old city. ⁵⁸

In this space of memory and transitional possibility created by the earthquakes’ disruption of the previous settler narrative, Ngāi Tahu artist Nathan Pōhio’s 2015 work Raise the anchor, unfurl the sails, set course to the centre of an ever setting sun!! (2015, Figure 8), articulates a previous moment of transition. It reworks a newspaper photograph from 1905 showing a row of Ngāi Tūāhuriri leaders on horseback wearing Maori cloaks (korowai and kākahu), escorting the small open car of Governor Lord and Lady Plunket on a visit to the Tuahiwi Marae (meeting house of Ngāi Tūāhuriri hapū) north of the city, originally framed as ‘The Visit of His Excellency the Governor to Kaiapoi: the Viceregal party with the Maori Escort’. Raise the anchor, unfurl the sails, set course to the centre of an ever setting sun!! invokes the mana (status) and manaakitanga (hospitality) of Ngāi Tūāhuriri against the performative articulation of colonial power. It also contrasts the traditional, augmented by the horses introduced by settlers, and the modern, in the motorcar that foreshadows the future. Pōhio frames this as a cinematic image, a moment of encounter in a Western film, but also a work of expanded cinema that foregrounds Indigenous voices. ⁵⁹

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Figure 8.

(a) and (b) Nathan Pōhio, Raise the anchor, unfurl the sails, set course to the centre of an ever setting sun!! (2015) Commissioned by SCAPE Public Art. Image courtesy of the artist and Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch. Photo by Hannah Watkinson.

In the work, the original newspaper photograph has been re-imaged and enlarged, and is mounted on two sides of a large free-standing illuminated billboard, facing both the setting and the rising sun. Appearing in the city out of 110 years past, the image reaches through the earthquake’s social and historical ruptures, and looks to a future in which the settler – mana whenua relationship can be reformed. It acknowledges the fact that, as historian and Ngāi Tūāhuriri representative Te Maire Tau puts it, ‘Māori live with their ancestors at a series of different levels, all within the present’. ⁶⁰ After its initial installation in Christchurch, the work set sail for documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany, and subsequently in 2018 found a permanent anchor in Little Hagley Park, Christchurch. The horses now stand on land where their predecessors may once have grazed when Ngāi Tūāhuriri brought produce to sell to the new pākehā settlers in Christchurch. ⁶¹ The title Pōhio bestows on the image, Raise the anchor, unfurl the sails, set course to the centre of an ever setting sun!!, shows us that together Māori and pākehā, horses and motor car, are embarking on a journey into a future that is not yet complete. Reinstalled, the work speaks back through the earthquakes, to moments of meeting and hospitality between settlers and mana whenua, moving forwards to new forms of economic, social and cultural relationships with Ngāi Tahu and Ngāi Tūāhuriri in the rebuilding city. Here the earthquake is not forgotten, but part of a much longer history of living on and with the environment.

Seismicity (of media)

Seismic media understands the planet as an active agent and long-term collaborator in creative practices. Throughout this essay we have described the process of art, media and geological co-creation in an environment long subject to aftershocks. These seismic mediations have enabled new understandings of place, and new forms of geoaesthetic placemaking within the transitional environment. Understanding the lived experience of earthquakes through seismic media in Christchurch has been a process of engaging with the ongoing dynamism of the planet and discovering new ways of inhabiting a city. ⁶²

With the cordons long removed, and buildings now beginning to fill up the gaps, the rebuilt city lies on top of not just the long history of Māori and European settlement, but the immediately pre-quake city, and the transitional cities as well – the months and years between 22 February 2011 and late 2021, and onwards. In this new city shining buildings offer new perspectives. The golden-clad central library, Tūranga, opens windows and balconies to previously impossible views of the Anglican Christ Church cathedral in its eponymous central square, as it is prepared for de- and re-construction. Another balcony looks over the dance-o-mat, still in daily use, a riverside promenade, the Margaret Mahy Playground heaving with children in action and new Gap Filler-initiated projects commissioned to energise space intended for inner city apartments – a pump track, swings designed for Instagramming, a slackline park, basketball hoops and hammocks.

In the 6 km² of residential land along the Ōtākaro Avon river from the city to the sea, ‘red zoned’ after the earthquakes, lie 7,350 now long-empty residential sections. The original boundaries between properties are fading as boundary trees expand, and they now open into wide open parkland, awaiting the resolution of future plans for wetlands, recreational pathways and new forests. This is a new space of transition, open to experimentation with ways of engaging with land that has become lower and more prone to flooding after the transformation of the earthquakes.

By rising up and shattering an apparently quiet settler-colonial city the geological asserted itself with a seismic force. For the people who experienced the Christchurch earthquakes, geology could no longer be understood as separate from the people who occupy the city in the past, present and future. David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s Geology, as well as Jo Burzynska and Malcolm Riddoch’s Body Waves point to the significance of this shattering, and Nathan Pōhio’s Raise the anchor, unfurl the sails, set course to the centre of an ever setting sun!! connects back to an alliance between mana whenua and place that is much longer than settler colonial narratives that date the city to the draining of a swamp.

The various human and more-than-human experiences of living within seismic environments point towards an understanding of the aesthetic energies of the planet. The experience of seismicity is formed through an understanding of instability, which extends to human experiences within the Anthropocene. As shown by these examples, if we live well with earthquakes, with ‘a dynamic and excessive subtending of human life’, we may develop transitional practices that are both aesthetic and embodied. These transitional experiences and places will require further elaboration in the Anthropocene, to consider the choices that are made to inhabit a place. ⁶³ The geological upheaval was more than physical; collectively, the earthquake shifted the boundary conditions by which people in Christchurch understood their relationship with earth systems, and artists relearnt the geological contexts of their practice. The seismic media considered in this essay speak to personal and local experiences that invite reflection on how seismic energies pervade bodies and memories. Seismic understandings of media frame these new forms of art making as practical experiments with earth processes. Seismic media presents a new aesthetic through which to understand the human and more-than-human forces that make up the planet today.

We are not suggesting that this is true for all earthquakes and all cities. Christchurch was a particular experience: it has led to a phenomenal amount of local theorising, publication and storytelling, as well as many creative productions that are beyond the scale of this essay. On 15 March 2019 the fresh horror of the attacks on the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre reverberated around a city still carrying the emotional weight of that previous time of silent shut-down, hovering helicopters, visibly armed police – rare in New Zealand – and live television news broadcasts from the streets. Unlike the aftermath of the 22 February 2011 earthquake, however, the city itself was accessible in 2019, a site in which flowers could be laid, memorials held, and residents could gather together, against a human rather than natural force.

Working with the earthquakes and their media has taught us much about the amount of time it takes for stories to emerge. This tracing of artists’ relationships with the material geology of a city points to new geological and aesthetic understandings. Media and experiences are still evolving, as houses and public spaces are still being rebuilt. Many of the evocative images of the Lisbon earthquake were published 100 years after the event. Media and image cycles are now much faster, and as we have shown, many creative responses to Christchurch were immediate and dynamic. Rather than considering media as a reflective material, we have suggested that seismic media is the result of co-creation between the elemental energies of the earthquake, the creative energies of the artists and the community and social energies of the city.