#7 Crossings : histories of the Ōtāhuhu Canal Reserve
Holding Open and Opening the Hold
Welcome back to Words Near Me!
Thank you for staying onboard.
The locus of this post is my new performance project Crossings : histories of the Otahuhu Canal Reserve. I am presenting this as part of Auckland Heritage Festival : Topography, Taonga and Trailblazers.
A driver or motivator for me in this project is my desire to explore how my local neighbourhood relates to, neighbours with, the ‘wider world.’ How do I constructively explore the local in relation to ‘the global’ (say logistics, say measurable distances) or ‘the planetary’ (say materialities, say ecologies [or eco-logo-choreo-graphies]).
Thus my concerns turn back to the first post of Words Near Me, with its interest in Debjani Ganguly’s article “Catastrophic Form and Planetary Realism” (2020), and its discussion of differences between the global and the planetary, for example, its reference to what Dipesh Chakrabarty writes, “the harder we work the earth in our increasing quest for profit and power, the more we encounter the planet.”
Crossings: in-and-with this project I am responding performatively and poetically to several proposals made, since the 1860s, to build a canal, a commercial sea route, between Tāmaki Makaurau’s Manukau Harbour and Waitematā Harbour.
Harbouring more ambition than it can hold, let’s say the project will swim…somewhere…anywhere…towards any one, and before some one, some others, some neighbours, assembled, some people, some members of an audience attending this Auckland Heritage Festival ‘Walks and Tours’ event, performance on Saturday 8 October and/or Saturday 15 October from 9am to 10.30am at Ōtāhuhu Canal Reserve, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
“Thomas sat and looked at the sea”
Brent
sat downstood and looked at the creek
Wares, materials that might be packed into this boat’s hold for the Crossings include the following:
Stories about proposals for a canal along the line of the pre-European portage at Ōtāhuhu between the Waitematā; and the Manukau
historical documents pertaining to those proposals;
my feelings and questions about global supply chains today in relation to ‘the planetary’;
supply-chain, en-chain-ment, chainé turns, chains, series, knots, cuts and reties;
the blockage of the Suez Canal in 2021 by the Ever Given;
Panama Road in neighbouring Mount Wellington, and Panama Canal;
again, turning back to the first post of Words Near Me, manipulations of scale in performance composition;
Auckland Heritage Festival’s subtitle “Topography” Topo-graphy - Typo - graphy, “Taonga”—Te Reo Maori word often translated as “Treasure”, and “Trailblazers” (cutting a trail, canal, a kind of colonial reference-field here of ‘discovery’… and smoke… trial, trialing, testing…);
AND I said in the first post too that Words Near Me would be something like an ‘open studio’. In relation to this I’ve been talking about my aim that Words Near Me would be—in my performance practice—breaking down, undoing, circumventing the distinction between ‘process’ and ‘product.’
Are we on a jetty, or still at sea? I have more to unpack.
Thank you for reading