“This is not the way things have to be.”
—Angela Davis^[01] 01. Quoting her mother’s words to her when she was young, cited in Adrienne Maree Brown, “Imagination is a Muscle,” in Not Too Late, ed. Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua (Chicago: Haymarket, 2023), p.209.

 

“There’s a difference between sharing feelings in a moment and proscribing how to behave.”
—Anahera Gildea (Ngāti Tukorehe)^[02] 02. Anahera Gildea, at Taraheke Press’ joint launch for her book Sedition, and Michaela Keeble’s Surrender, Unity Books, Wellington, Matariki 2022 (24 June 2022).

I Te Ata Pūao—At First Light

At dawn in the Kingdom of Tonga on the autumn equinox, Kalisolaite ‘Uhila’s profile slowly differentiates from a stone archway as the sky lightens. On 21 March 2023 ‘Uhila positions himself in front of Ha‘amonga ‘a Maui, an ancient channel for solstices and equinoxes, to form a direct line to the sun. In the recording of the livestream, I watch the artist as he sits and watches the day awaken.^[03] 03. Kalisolaite ‘Uhila, “Sun Gate: Ha‘amonga ‘a Maui," in Te Moana Nui a Kiwa, World Weather Network, 2023, accessed 11 July 2023, www.worldweathernetwork.org/event/tetuhi-event-3/ ‘Uhila meditates on grass beneath a threshold that has been used as a sundial since the thirteenth century; notches in the stone indicate solar movements at stages of the year, such as this, when day and night are balanced. It’s ironic, then, that in this durational performance the weather shifts and the sun is obscured through much of the day by cloud and rain, most of which ‘Uhila endures. In an unseasonably wet autumn, after a year of unseasonal weather patterns around Te Moana Nui a Kiwa (the Great Ocean of Kiwa, or the Pacific Ocean) ‘Uhila bears witness to both ancient Polynesian methods of measuring time and contemporary climatic shifts caused by global warming.^[04] 04. In January 2022 the Kingdom of Tonga also experienced the enormous eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai, an underwater volcano that sent shockwaves and a tsunami across the ocean and blanketed the island in ash, causing communication issues that Tonga continues to experience. The Kingdom of Tonga—like other island nations across Te Moana Nui a Kiwa—is facing increasingly severe cyclones, rising seas, and the shifting seasons that artists across the transpacific are grappling with.^[05] 05. Transpacific is a term commonly used by scholars and artists from across the Pacific, such as Craig Santos Perez, Rob Sean Wilson and Amy Chin. See, for example, Rob Sean Wilson, “Oceania as Peril and Promise Towards a Worlded Vision of Transpacific Ecopoetics,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 10, no. 2 (2019), www.academia.edu/104080956/  

‘Uhila’s performance forms one weather report from the station Te Moana Nui a Kiwa—hosted by Te Tuhi, a venue for contemporary art in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland—which is Aotearoa New Zealand’s contribution to the World Weather Network. This global collaboration of twenty-eight arts organisations attempts to respond to climatic processes and trace human influences in weather phenomena. The Network is one answer to the question anyone who’s not in climate change denial is asking: How must we respond?^[06] 06. For more on why it’s not too late to do something, and why we must respond, see the #nottoolate project by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua: www.nottoolateclimate.com/faq  

In the lead-up to Matariki 2022 (the Māori lunar New Year), a series of six artworks from Aotearoa and Oceania unfolded on the internet in step with the Maramataka (the Māori lunar calendar).^[07] 07. In 2022 Matariki fell on 24 June. These reports formed the Pacific weather station, and culminated in Huarere: Weather Ear, Weather Eye, an exhibition of a selection of the online works at Te Tuhi. The exhibition, which opened a few weeks before Matariki 2023, and the weather station’s kaupapa (purpose) were manifested by curator Janine Randerson (Pākehā) and, supported by the gallery, executed by a suite of artists across Aotearoa, Rarotonga, Niue, Sāmoa and the Kingdom of Tonga. Guided by mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledges) the artworks deeply consider the rhythms of celestial bodies and the equinoxes of the Southern Hemisphere, as well as the interconnection of oceanic cycles and atmospheric currents. As such, the works represent “social meteorological” practices; socially orientated and transdisciplinary in their engagements with community members, scientists, visual and sound artists, sculptors, writers and kaumātua (elders), as well as their conceptions of knowing and being that originate in the cultures of Oceania.^[08] 08. Janine Randerson, “Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear Essay,” Te Tuhi, accessed 12 July 2023, www.tetuhi.art/huarere-weather-eye-weather-ear-essay/ In these reports we witness human sensing, listening and profound observation; methods of tuning in to the wildness of the islands in this part of the globe, the big weather of Oceania, the omnipresence of the sky and ocean, and the mood- and land-shifting power of the rain and wind. We observe, too, the presence and force of more-than-human elements. These works implicate us in what Aotearoa theorist Amanda Monehu Yates calls “rapacious petrocapitalism”—or what is sometimes described as the “petrocene” that denotes our era of intensive petrochemical exploitation in a geological terminology more accurate, more accusatory, than Anthropocene.^[09] 09. Amanda Monehu Yates, “Transforming Geographies: Performing Indigenous-Māori Ontologies and Ethics of More-Than-Human Care in an Era of Ecological Emergency,” New Zealand Geographer 77, no. 2, 8 August 2021, 101, www.doi.org/10.1111/nzg.12302 This wording reorients our focus to the ecological crisis with its mass extinction of biodiversity that we are currently witnessing; this great industrial exhalation of carbon dioxide that extinguishes life.

Te Hā O Te Haukū—First Chilling Breath

Haupapa (Tasman) glacier and lake, located on the eastern foot of Aoraki, is the fastest-growing body of water in Aotearoa. In Haupapa: The Chilled Breath of Rakamaomao, ancient pockets of air within the glacial ice are starting points for spiritual, aesthetic and scientific observations of ice melt.^[10] 10. Ron Bull, Stefan Marks, Heather Purdie, Janine Randerson, and Rachel Shearer, “Haupapa: The Chilled Breath of Rakamaomao,” in Te Moana Nui a Kiwa, World Weather Network, 2023, accessed 12 July 2023, www.worldweathernetwork.org/report/te-tuhi-report-2/  In the local Kāi Tahu whakapapa (genealogical narratives), Rakamaomao is an ancestor associated with wind and weather. In turn, Haupapa glacier is the deep, chilly exhalation of the Kāi Tahu ancestor mountain, Aoraki. This narrative genealogy of place before Europeans arrived (or, as Indigenous Australian activist and poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal says, “B.C., by which I mean Before Cook”^[11] 11. Quoted in “Dreamtime, Machinetime (1987),” Australian Screen, 2:49, www.aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/dreamtime-machinetime/clip1/ ) contextualises Haupapa: The Chilled Breath of Rakamaomao temporally and spiritually, and in doing so aligns with the kaupapa of the weather station: situating knowledge in and of place. 

In the work, a responsive animation of underwater and close-up images at Haupapa by Janine Randerson is augmented by Stefan Marks’ (Pākehā) data visualisations of live rainfall, wind speed, snow depth, temperature and solar radiation measurements at the site. These are all factors that influence the shrinking of glaciers and are measured by glaciologist and scientific advisor for the project Heather Purdie (Pākehā). Hydrophone recordings of the ice and water by Rachel Shearer (Rongowhakaata, Te Aitanga a Māhaki, Pākehā) and voiceover by Ron Bull (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha) build on Randerson’s moving images. From the work’s initial live-streaming in spring equinox, September 2022 until the end of 2023, all three elements of moving-image, soundscape and voice responded live to changes in the weather data provided by a weather station in Aoraki National Park run by the National Institute for Weather and Atmospheric Research.

Ron Bull describes this weather report as a narrative that comes from the landscape itself; as such, Haupapa: The Chilled Breath of Rakamaomao feels a fully collaborative work—not only in the devising and creation process but in the artwork’s live responsivity to the weather patterns on the ground.^[12] 12. Marie Sheehan, Hiraani Himona, Ron Bull, Heather Purdie, Rachel Shearer, Stefan Marks and Janine Randerson, “Haupapa: Approaching a Glacier,” Te Tuhi, 11 November 2022, www.tetuhi.art/world-weather-network/reportage/haupapa-approaching-a-glacier/  And the piece is symbiotic with the narratives of Kāi Tahu through Bull, and their whakapapa of atua (supernatural beings) and winds in relationship to this area. The feedback loop between human activity and climatic shift is centred as the landscape’s narrative draws our attention to the ways in which Haupapa glacier is eroded subtly by literal human footprints and more blatantly by our collective, global carbon footprint as we ignore, to our detriment, the wisdom and power of the atua and the tīpuna (ancestors) who walked before us.

The Weather Choir ‘Kōea o Tāwhirimātea’ grapples with hā, the breath, in a more singular way.^[13] 13. Breath of Weather Collective, The Weather Choir ‘Kōea o Tāwhirimātea’ in Te Moana Nui a Kiwa, World Weather Network, 2023, accessed 12 July 2023, www.worldweathernetwork.org/report/te-tuhi-report-1/ Aeolian wind harps—tall, mast-like wind instruments—use wind currents as their activators; they are both musical and weather-monitoring instruments. The Breath of Weather Collective, comprised of artists from eight locations around Te Moana Nui a Kiwa, translates the forces of wind and rain into voicings through these harps—these transducers of a kind—and record the results on their phones. Organiser Phil Dadson wished to bring together artists from coastal communities that are under some sort of climatic duress to build a raft of locations that form a circle around Oceania: Rarotonga, Niue, Tonga, Sāmoa and Aotearoa.^[14] 14. Niyati Dave, “Visceral Sounds: Three Sound Art Projects Attune to Our Shifting Landscapes,” Stir World, 26 December 2022, www.stirworld.com/see-features-visceral-sounds-three-sound-art-projects-attune-to-our-shifting-landscapes  The artists were sent harp kits to adjust and refine using site-specific materials. In Haumoana we see Dianne Reefman and Ricks Terstappen, a Hawkes Bay sculptor, using one of Ricks’ own spherical sculptures as harp ballast, along with an apple-picking ladder from the orchard-rich region as tripod. In Niue Mark and Ahi Cross balance their harp on lashed bamboo trunks; in Taranaki Pasha Clothier’s A-frame is juxtaposed against the shape of Taranaki maunga (mountain).

But it is Phil Dadson and James McCarthy’s dispatches from Tāmaki Makaurau and Whakatāne, respectively, that show the most fluency with this aeolian form. Both are members of experimental sound group From Scratch, known for its percussive and political work in response to nuclear testing in the Pacific. McCarthy’s video work emphasises the recent, recurring ‘100-year’ heavy rains on the North Island’s east coast and provides a view into the storms that have ravaged the region in the last year. Howling wind and driving rain push McCarthy’s heavily weighted harp resonator sideways—along with tree branches. This intensity is balanced by McCarthy’s emphasis on the moon in his video and his extended lens-based studies of the cosmic interior of his metal-bin resonator, suggesting the harp’s attunement with planetary bodies; a poetic resonance.

The Breath of Weather Collective’s videos and audio recordings can be played together as a whole, or in small groups, to create a swelling of sound—a virtual choir that would work equally as well in a gallery setting. The online viewer/listener becomes conductor of this choir, symbolising human influence on the weather system. 

But human voices feel lacking in some of the collective’s dispatches; or perhaps the artwork statement online draws too much attention to the fact that artists were invited to include their own commentary in their videos. Given the human role in climate change, this absence feels notable. But the most striking element of The Weather Choir ‘Kōea o Tāwhirimātea’ is the aeolian sonic—ranging from the deep guttural noise of the larger harps (in Haumoana and Niue) to a shrill, multi-layered thrum in Sāmoa and the Cook Islands. Both ends of this spectrum are eerie and disquieting, capturing a sense of dread. “The aeolian structure gives voice to the atmosphere,” states Dadson, “letting us hear the cries and warnings of the planet.”^[15] 15. Phil Dadson, “Voicing the Winds: Kōea o Tāwhirimātea—Weather Choir,” Garland Magazine, 1 June 2023, www.garlandmag.com/article/singing-the-wind/

In the dispatch from Haumoana, a resident comments on the shrinking foreshore due to sea level rise and “large seas.” The trees are dying, she says, “this used to be green.” Similarly, Dadson’s dispatch from Rangitoto and Motutapu Islands notes the unseasonably warm weather there in mid-July, with temperatures ranging between 12 and 18 degrees, and the extreme rainfall. “These changes, they’re right in your face, from day to day,” he tells us.^[16] 16. Breath of Weather Collective, The Weather Choir ‘Kōea o Tāwhirimātea’, accessed 12 July 2023, www.worldweathernetwork.org/report/te-tuhi-report-1/  As we move through a year of record land and sea temperatures that began in Aotearoa with late-summer flooding and a cyclone that together killed fifteen and left thousands of people displaced, this act of bearing witness requires of us more and more strength.^[17] 17. David Stanway, “World Hits Record Land, Sea Temperatures as Climate Change Fuels 2023 Extremes,” Reuters, 3 July 2023, accessed 11 July 2023, www.reuters.com/business/environment/climate-nears-point-no-return-land-sea-temperatures-break-records-experts-2023-06-30/

The responsive sonics of these two works—The Weather Choir ‘Kōea o Tāwhirimātea’ and Haupapa: The Chilled Breath of Rakamaomao—highlight a salient theme of Janine Randerson’s curatorial concept: a sensorial, phenomenological engagement with the climatic system that we shape, just as it shapes us. Sonic and visual media open us to ways of meteorological knowing, sensing, observing and being. 

Ngaru Tapu O Hokianga—Sacred Waves of Hokianga

The series Hukatai ~ Sea Foam acknowledges agency in a surface-water element that might easily slip our gaze and our grasp: sea foam.^[18] 18. Denise Batchelor and Maureen Lander, Hukatai ~ Sea Foam, in Te Moana Nui a Kiwa, World Weather Network, 2023, accessed 12 July 2023, www.worldweathernetwork.org/report/te-tuhi-report-7/  Frothy, creamy and buoyant, this product of salt and fresh water intermingling increases acutely during storms—whose frequency and severity are ever more pronounced—and more chronically in steadily rising ocean temperatures. Sea foam is an oceanic canary in the atmospheric carbon dump; a harbinger of the dangers of CO2. 

Three lens-based, year-long studies by Denise Batchelor (Pākehā)—Hokianga-nui-a-Kupe, Waimamaku and Mitimiti—form Batchelor’s collaboration with multimedia artist Maureen Lander (Te Hikutu, Ngāpuhi). Their close working relationship is evident where they appear in photographs walking together and observing the Hokianga coastline in the summer of 2023.

In Hokianga-nui-a-Kupe, the place of Pacific ancestor Kupe’s final departure for Hawaiki, Batchelor’s photographs and videos of the tidal zone around her home in the Hokianga Harbour convey studied precision; the light and contrast are balanced exactly, her object of focus is always sharp. Yet the images are emotive, too; a melancholic gaze at rolling swells, a whimsical pan along the foreshore to follow a flitting foam blob. The colours of Te Tai Tokerau (the northernmost region of Aotearoa) and the Hokianga Harbour infuse Batchelor’s images with beige sand, blue-green waters, navy skies. But most in focus is the weird, ebullient foam, which scoots over wet sand, or, as cream-coloured blobs, rolls and darts on the surface of water. 

To the south, the coast of Waimamaku is the estuarine and rocky subject of Batchelor’s second dispatch. The wave of hukatai (huka meaning foam, tai meaning tide) crashes to the fore and we see foam in the process of mixing, making. Batchelor’s lens zooms in on the intricate bubbles that cohere into foam. This leads into the third dispatch in the series, Mitimiti, in which Batchelor draws our attention to water as a nutrient-rich substance at risk of pollution. Foam can indicate the presence of toxins such as microplastics and algae blooms. In the first video at Mitimiti, seawater churns and swirls and we see foam arising from a potentially polluted soup. 

The effect is one of agency; not in the sense that the sea foam is portrayed as animate or alive, but rather that its animation conveys to us the interlinkage of natural climatic components—wind, surface currents, deep currents, air temperature, water temperature, salinity, plant life—and how, together, these components form a system that lives and that animates. That gives us breath. That waters us. That houses us in weather. This is an interconnectivity that moves past what might be described as a new-materialist depiction of individually vibrant quasi-agents into a consideration of the life-giving power of synergistic structures, when they are cohesive and healthy. We can focus in on one element of these structures, to bring us clarity—foam as a symptom of a system out of balance—but we are called upon by this work to view the whole of te taiao (the natural world) and our whanaungatanga (kinship) with all parts of it to understand how our consumption of too many resources and production of too many toxins depletes the whole.

The emotive quality of Batchelor’s studies is enhanced by a soundscape by Stìobhan Lothian, an Aotearoa-based sound artist. Lothian’s electronic soundscape is alternatively melancholic, otherworldly and buoyant. This buoyancy is especially noticeable in Waimamaku, when the soundscape’s chirps and pips give voice to a seagrass that is lapped by small waves or when it enhances the alien nature of a yellowing blob of foam through bright, synth-like notes.

Further, the interplay of single elements and larger structures comes through in Ngaru Paewhenua, a physical installation at Te Tuhi’s Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear. Here Maureen Lander’s contribution to Hukatai ~ Sea Foam—a hanging wave of dried harakeke (Phormium tenax, used to make flax-like fibre)—absorbs and refracts light and sound, textured by a single-channel video by Batchelor, and Lothian’s soundscape.^[19] 19. View the installation at Te Tuhi’s Facebook page, “Te Tuhi is Open All Weekend with ‘Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear,’ an Exhibition Featuring Artists from Across Te Moana Nui a Kiwa in Response to Our New Weather,” Facebook, accessed 26 July 2023, www.web.facebook.com/watch/?v=229026059486640&ref=sharing&_rdc=1&_rdr We see human action (audio and visual recordings) shaping the harakeke and our perception of it. Lander’s accompanying maro (apron)—Wave Skirt—evokes both sea foam in the frayed ends of the harakeke, and Batchelor’s foam-carrying waters in its undulations. 

Te Ahi Kikoha—The Sharpened Flame

The questions we might ask about the meteorological and phenomenological impacts of our age of petrocapitalism are, in fact, simple. We might ask, for instance, how the wind sounds when it howls on an unseasonably warm, unseasonably windy mid-winter day on the Waitematā Harbour; what colours illuminate the east coast foreshore when the seawater rises high enough to kill the trees; what shapes grief takes when rains take away place and people. The answers are simple, too: the vibrations of an instrument made from local materials; the beige of sea foam; the cracking voice of a person bewildered. 

Yet these answers are also profound in Oceania, where artists embody, or are shaped by, an awareness of Indigenous ways of being in their responses to ecological emergency—emergency and crisis most often not created by Indigenous Pacific communities. Mātauranga Māori and Pacific epistemologies are highlighted in the reports from Te Moana Nui a Kiwa as unique strengths of this region—strengths, however, that have been historically suppressed and extinguished by settler colonialism. There’s an injustice in the fact that these ways of knowing and being are called upon to respond to an ecological crisis created by the very systems that tried to extinguish them. 

A shift in our collective actions and a response to ecological crisis that is urgent and full of heart requires a conception of being that includes whanaungatanga with more-than-human kin and a sense of our interconnectedness with other people across Te Moana Nui a Kiwa. Such interconnectedness can only be built on an acknowledgement of the impacts of settler colonialism and US imperialism in the Pacific. Te Tuhi’s contribution to the World Weather Network’s collective activation is its creation of space for the situated knowledges of Te Moana Nui a Kiwa. Positioning mātauranga Māori and Pacific epistemologies as important frameworks of more-than-human ontologies enables a response to ecological crisis that begins to address the ongoing impacts of colonialism and imperialism, and recentres Indigenous and ecological wellbeing.^[20] 20. See Yates, “Transforming Geographies: Performing Indigenous-Māori Ontologies and Ethics of More-Than-Human Care in an Era of Ecological Emergency,” 101.  Frameworks like the Maramataka, which guides actions like planting, harvesting and fishing, and is developed based on human observations over centuries, offer tools to reattune non-Māori ears and eyes.

Kalisolaite ‘Uhila’s livestream from Tonga is notable for its technological capaciousness, which must have taken foresight and engineering to arrange.^[21] 21. Key here is the digital divide created by the online setting of ‘Uhila’s work and the World Weather Network’s project more generally. While the OECD nations most responsible for global warming are extensively connected to the virtual sphere, which contributes to carbon emissions through hardware manufacturing and energy use, Pacific Island nations have much less access. In the Kingdom of Tonga, for example, forty-one percent of locals have internet access, while nearby Aotearoa New Zealand has a ninety-four percent access rate. This suggests the ongoing legacy of colonial power structures in the region. See www.datareportal.com/reports/digital-2022-tonga  But at a certain point in his Sun Gate: Ha‘amonga 'a Maui livestream, Kalisolaite ‘Uhila becomes fed up with his endurance performance. After ten hours of vigil in rain and cloud, the weather not co-operating, he simply walks away from his smartphone. It is unclear whether the livestream operator Andrew Kennedy walks away too. Either way, we are left gazing at the arch, the Burden of Maui. This gaze feels appropriate, planned even, given that, as ‘Uhila notes, “Polynesian stories of Maui often reflect the trials that occur when humanity goes out of sync with natural rhythms”—such as in climate change.^[22] 22. ‘Uhila, Sun Gate: Ha‘amonga ‘a Maui, www.worldweathernetwork.org/event/tetuhi-event-3/  I’m interested in ‘Uhila’s moment of walking away, because it points us both towards a trial and to an elsewhere, beyond the digital sphere. In response to a project out of sync with the sun, a humanity out of sync with nature, ‘Uhila walks towards others, kin perhaps, to talk, to gather in a place with food and company, to warm up, on an island where few people are likely to be online and fewer still watching his livestream. And so ‘Uhila’s refusal reminds us of the power of reorientation toward kinship and toward situated knowledges. Our power, as Te Moana Nui a Kiwa asserts, is in being together, sharing feeling, noticing deeply the cycles we’re in.