Taonga
"Ave" - Video Still
July 2007
At 3am on the 26th April, 1998, tonnes of toxic sludge fingered its way through a river system, choking all living things and flicking them up onto its surface to drift dead eyed. A retaining wall had broken in a mine further up the river Guadiamar in Andalusia. It was one of the biggest ecological disasters of modern Europe.
The mine was shut down immediately (making hundreds redundant) and the company charged with the cleaning bill while the Andalusian Government found itself the new owner of over 1,200 hectares of contaminated farmland and river bed. It wasn't so much a disaster as an environmental opportunity. The toxic spill had been a catastrophe, but hundreds of years of unsustainable farming practice had stripped the lands and destroyed the waterway links to the point that the accumulated damage was almost as bad. Laws were passed, money was invested and while starting on the back foot with relatively nothing, the Guadiamar Green Corridor was born.
The river Guadiamar feeds into one of Spain's biggest rivers the Guadalquivir (from the Arabic al-wad al-kabir, "The Great River") and this new corridor today protects the links between the precious dunes and salt marshes of Doñana National Park to the hill country beyond. The recuperation over the last nine years, of both flora and fauna has been surprisingly rapid and the Ramsar Convention for wetlands has acknowledged the importance of the work. The project has also focused on reverting parts of the river back to its former meander, eliminating old dykes and irrigation channels. Apart from the ecological importance of the area, these rivers have been home to Tartessans, Romans, Arabs, the ships of catholic monarchs setting out in search of the New World...and now me.
There have been many rivers in my life. In the hinterland of the North Island, next to a gushing papa-cliffed river, my brother and I were born. It was with long strides that Haunui-a-nanaia reached and named it rangi - day - tikei - to stride out, as he followed his runaway wife Wairaka south to Pukerua. My father was born further down, next to the Oroua. I spent two years living by the Whanganui, and the Manawatu was my childhood home and witness to my first adolescent group skinny dip (never told you about that mum). Generations of my family have walked along the mouth at Foxton beach in various fashions of beach wear, watching the crackling dry grey sand of the river's edge cave in under foot. They probably never knew, as I know I never did, how important that estuary is for migrating birds. When I was last home, my parents and I went down there for a walk and contemplated this treasure that I had always thought of as a wasteland next to the caravan park.
A few weeks ago I was offered a short artist residency. The studio/house where I could stay, make work and basically go feral for a while, is in Sanlucar de Barrameda, a fishing and wine making town on the mouth of the river Guadalquivir on the Atlantic Coast. On a visit, the owners and I sat there in the studio in front of a large window with bowls of Salmorejo (a thicker version of Gazpacho), homemade crab pate on crackers, and sipping the town’s famous dry Manzanilla or white sherry. Out the window, some twenty meters away, the Guadalquivir flowed and Doñana beckoned.
Various thoughts passed through my head as I sat there eating and drinking. Apart from how incredibly fortunate I felt to have the opportunity, and how Peta Mathias could eat her heart out, I was sitting in front of a mirror that reflected something close to home. Janet Frame, in the third book of her autobiography spoke of the "mirror city" to which she went and of which she wrote. It struck me that I was in front of another type of mirror, like the reflection of a spoon, showing this river here on one side of the world, but also inverted, reflecting another place. It was a mirror world in which to enter, where the precious Guadalquivir and Manawatu simultaneously existed, and it was too good to pass up.