Writing

Echoes of the Sea: Witnessing Ecological Loss Written by Ruth Minh Ha

Wenerei 23 Oketopa

Wednesday 23 October

2024

The rivers no longer meet at the sea, 

waters diverted to grow white gold, 

and you melted up into the sky.1

 

In a desert that was once the Aral Sea, children play amongst rusty shipwrecks covered with graffiti. Initials in hearts of chalk - R + M, D + A - mark the corroded metal. They stand for expressions of young, naive love and the age-old declaration: I was here. As if the dried-out sea wasn’t enough of a testament to human presence. 

These scenes thread It’s always ourselves we find in the sea, Rozana Lee’s pensive filmic tribute to the Aral Sea. The sea has been shrinking since the 1960s, when a series of Soviet irrigation initiatives diverted the rivers that fed it. The camera switches between shots of the barren, sepia-toned desert and lush fields of cotton - the ‘white gold’ for which the Aral Sea was sacrificed. The neighbouring video works Luminous grey and Trash, smog and coal document landfills in Ōtepoti and Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek, uniting in a grim showreel of human mistreatments of land and water. The juxtaposition of Ōtepoti’s familiarity with these two distant, seemingly unrelated locations in Central Asia shows us that we do not have to look far afield for spectacles of environmental destruction. Lee weaves these narratives together with poetic motifs, peppering the works with birds, railway tracks, and children, the latter serving as a universal appeal for a better future. She also leaves the Aral Sea film silent, letting the beach soundscape of Luminous grey resonate throughout the gallery as a ghostly remnant of a sea that once was. 

Drawn to see(a), an exhibition consisting of documentary films, research images and three textile works, is a powerful portrayal of living through the climate crisis. Many of us are lucky to not (yet) experience its effects first-hand, and we have become numb to the never-ending news of weather anomalies, droughts and floods, of record-breaking hot days and summers. Lee’s use of the handheld camera, with its often shaky shots, breaks through the apathy and invites her audience into the embodied act of witnessing. Instead of an omnipresent, zoomed-out drone footage of a ravaged earth, we walk with Lee, grounded in her gaze. In It’s always ourselves we find in the sea and Trash, smog and coal, we pass marooned ships, mounds of waste and dilapidated warehouses that could belong in an apocalyptic feature film. But in Luminous grey we see dog walkers enjoying a sunset on St Clair beach, a picture-perfect Kiwi dream, if you ignore the text at the bottom of the screen. With an unnervingly dispassionate tone, one that mimics the bureaucratic reports from the exhibition’s reading resources, it lists the refuse hidden beneath the surface: demolition materials and gasworks waste, asbestos, lead, coal and tar. Like a voice of (eco)conscience, it captions our everyday with reminders of the climate crisis, haunting us with the knowledge we can never unlearn. 

If the video works symbolise the act of witnessing environmental destruction, Lee’s textiles serve as a way of working through and making something anew from that awareness. In White gold, Lee hand-felted scraps of Aotearoa merino with a cotton rag sourced at an Uzbek Bazaar, creating a delicate abstracted landscape that is cloudlike in its softness. 26 feet under, laid on the floor beside the Ōtepoti-based projection, alludes to the 180,000 tonnes of textile waste that Aotearoa produces each year.2 Its twisting, intestinal forms resemble a gaping abdomen, exposed to the air like the landfill we thought we buried. In Patience of the stones, Lee uses an ink stick to trace the imprint of St Clair seawall onto a large sheet of silk georgette and then treated the fabric with ocean water for six months. Recalling the gesture of haptic remembrance previously used in Shapes of love, a 2022 series where Lee rubbed the shapes of her family tombs onto calico, Patience of the stones introduces St Clair beach as a co-producer of the work. Echoing Bruno Latour’s writing on the Parliament of Things,3 it attempts to give the non-human a voice.

For those familiar with Lee’s practice, the environmentalism of Drawn to see(a) may seem like an unexpected shift in focus. After all, she came to prominence for her explorations of cross-cultural mobility and notions of belonging, often realised on film or delicate batik cloth, hand-dyed and drawn on with melted wax. Yet Lee’s emphasis on the inherent connectivity of people and processes - be it political conflicts and stories of migration, or globalisation and fabric patterns - uniquely positions her practice to portray the intimate entanglement of human and planetary histories. The climate crisis is an all-permeating issue, not an isolated problem we can shelve for when we have the time or the will to deal with it. It will not wait while we ‘grow as an economy,’ as our ministers may want to think. It’s happening now. What are we going to do about it?

1 Excerpt from It’s always ourselves we find in the sea, 2024

2 The dark side of fast fashion – Greenpeace

3 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. pp. 142-5

Chris Bishop, Minister of Infrastructure, quoted in 'Government unveils 149 projects selected by Fast-track Approvals Bill,' RNZ National, 6 October 2024

Ruth Minh Ha

Ruth Minh Ha is a writer based in Tāmaki Makaurau, currently working as a curatorial assistant at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Of Russian and Vietnamese heritage, Ha was born in Moscow and relocated to Aotearoa in 2016. She studied Art History at the University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau, and in 2023 was the recipient of the Michèle Whitecliffe Art Writing Prize.