I'm starting writing this today on the 4th September, 2022, a date that marks 12 years since the 2010 Christchurch earthquake. A geological event understood within discourse for a while, after the even more devastating event of 2011, as the 'first' quake. And perhaps some of us reading and listening also believed this. Within the settler imagination and timescales, it was unexpected, and this in turn cast the settler imagination and its timescales into a shocked confusion, even as it affected personal histories on the immediate level of crisis. As time went on and the initial shock turned to learning, the questions proliferated - had this happened before, and if so how and when?
The decade since this 'event' provides ample opportunity to reflect on several other temporalities, human and non-human. It has perhaps let us understand that the 'first' quake of the 4th of September was an event that cannot be understood as singular in any way, even if the structures of Anglo-Western naming initially led us - and continue to seduce us - into reifying it into a stasis, something that seals it into a nostalgic past. But far from singular, it is an event which kept - and still keeps - on its way. As a slow tremor, reverberating out beyond itself, into all of our histories, and as reverberant energy tends to do, changing and co-mingling them, through resonance as the fluttering and fraying of singularity, the troubling of borders. It has affected my family deeply, in ways that are ongoing, and complex, and will continue to be so.
And so our understanding of these events is also a reverberance and a resonance, and it is also a cultural tremor that has troubled and unfixed the histories of the built environment, of settlement, of historical settler-colonial narratives. In geological terms this excess continued until the force of the 'event' 's wave so drastically changed the city of my mother's mother's mother, that she would no longer recognise it as the ground she stood on. And of course it is not.
I am working on a long-term composition and transmission art piece called Marcasite Radio (an unstable object for Ann Ada) that fixes some of these troubles within the unstable voice of my mother's mother's mother. Its tangible form is a 1920s crystal radio set that I've restored and re-made from scratch to include a piece of her jewellery as its diode (a radio mineral, more on that in the initial (April 1, 2017) post about this project, here). The work uses this crystal radio as a site-specific transmission framework, to locate a composition, transmitted to the receiver on a hand-built AM transmitter. The composition's elements include my mother playing sheet music belonging to Ann on a family heirloom piano that survived the quakes (and that she can remember her grandmother playing as a child), field recordings of the sites of now-demolished family houses, and Ann's voice in the form of a re-composing of archival oral histories, into which my own voice intervenes. I think of it as akin to and having the methods of a kind of expanded, experimental autofictional documentary film, and simultaneously as a form of "radio fossil" - a radio play as a located object, that materialises pasts that remained implicit.
I have been working on this "new radio fossil" for over half a decade, within a still-longer timeframe of making work about the quakes, another temporality that has lent the project's own geological strata a richness, and has been a timeframe necessitated by the ensuing natural disaster of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has ensured my lack of access to several of the relevant sites in Aotearoa for almost three years. While impractical, this slowness doesn't strike me as a problem within radio cegeste's wider methods as have come to know them since I started doing this project in 2008. For several reasons, some of them biographical, some not. For example there is something about the uncanny kinship of the adopted person that is working its way to the surface within this work, and i want to give it time to do so. My Great-grandmother's name was Ann, which is my middle name (another resonance both historic and sonic, that ensures the slow "aaa" assonance of my name becomes a momentum across three syllables), and she was very old when i was born. She was buried in ground that has itself shifted, as she is buried in my naming structures, although i barely remember her and have lived a life without her knowledge being part of mine. Such are the amnesias of culture, the sense of knowledges being untransmitted, buried in ground that may yet crack open to reveal them. Working with radio teaches me that the signals of such histories do not disappear, but continue to reverberate. "Why are you so fascinated with the void?" someone once asked me after a lecture. I told them I hadn't believed in it for years, quoting Irigaray's troubling of the Air as an element in Heidegger's work, and also Babbage; explaining that also for me the air is inscriptive, the signals do not disappear, that the air is itself one vast library. These are my learnings, and they are somehow tied up with Ann's voice, what she saw in a life spanning most of the decades of the twentieth century, all of this spent in Aotearoa.
On the surface, there is little left of her here with me, although I have two voice recordings. Two hour-long oral histories recorded onto tape when she was 99 years old, in the 1980s. As I listen to these today on the anniversary of the 'first' quake, again I recognise something of my lost ground in them, just as the city and its surrounding landscape survives in her voice. Somewhere in the crackling material grain of that recorded voice, in the planes that the 99 year old voice throws onto the structures of 1980s cassette tape, like an echolocative signal, against its material surroundings, of familiar, recognisable, named structures, are the names of streets and the familiarity of pathways. In the voice, there is a lost town, a lost city, a lost world of hope.
I cannot see this town, this city, this hope. It is gone; as my mother (Ann's granddaughter) likes to point out, much of it was gone long before the earthquake shook down the buildings that comprised the remnants of it. But the invisible city is still there, in the voice and in the recording, triangulating within the memory spaces that create a new room, a set of landscapes like energetic pathways, in the room it was recorded in. I have set myself a task with Marcasite Radio (an unstable object for Ann Ada): to track this space for its invisible dimensions. To understand that the town and the city are still there in the voice, and that the hope will be, also: that it will appear to me if i am patient, if i learn how to listen; to listen better: to the earth, to the non-human, to the histories outside, below, parallel to this narrow bandwidth.
In this, the tapes appear talismanic, almost magic in their power to me. This is partly because the tapes themselves should not be here. For years i had thought they were lost when the Kaiapoi museum, where they, along with so many other family artefacts relating to Ann and even earlier, was demolished, after its historic building, which kept the memories of the town intact, was partly damaged in the very same September 4, 2010 quake. The building was unceremoniously pushed over with little regard for these vernacular histories and the - mainly elderly - caretakers of the artefacts only had a limited time to save them. I had been told by one of these people that the tapes were damaged so much that they were unlistenable. But because i know that the void doesn't exist, i also knew that searching for the signal, however faint, over however long a timespan, is worthwhile.
This thought had another surprising twist - while it is true that the original tapes did not survive, the archive has its own way of branching out into multiples, into new sets of possibilities. And after several years of searching i found another copy of them, in an unexpected place: in the form of a set of digitised files, sent to a distant relative in the UK i didn't know. But he wrote to me and forwarded the digitised files of Ann's voice.
I listened to Ann's voice today again. and the city, the town, the lost hope, is still there. I can almost hear it. Through the gaps, the hesitancies, the mistakes, the stutters, the sections of tape warble that obliterate the meaning of words, the moments of vivid recall, the voice that smiles with clarity.
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I'll be working on this project again over the 2022-23 Summer, with some initial experiments testing the transmitter coming up before this, perhaps live in front of an audience. Stay tuned.
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