22.02.2012 social radio memorial (with kim pieters and campbell walker)

on the 22nd February 2012 I got up at around 7am in my home, a dilapidated 1903 brick mansion in Dunedin, and turned on the radio. To be precise I turned on two radios : one a 1940s HMV valve set, and one a shortwave radio from the 1960s. The airwaves were already full of references to the event I was hoping to hear as a form of reverberance: the first anniversary of the February 22nd 2011 earthquake in Christchurch. The cultural codification of this event by the media had shifted and turned, radiating out from the rupture of the event itself, through various stages, and I had been, from the outset, interested in catching these as they fell and continued to fall, like the aftershocks from the event itself, and in listening to the way the mediascape would continue to shape public perception of this unfolding, the mass-participatory culture of the event.

On the 27th of February 2011, a week after the earthquake, a two minute memorial silence had been broadcast beginning at 12:51, as well as generally observed around New Zealand. Such a sound event is familiar to us from the Anzac Day tradition, one of the professed founding documents of Nationalism in Australasia (although not, it must be pointed out, of nationhood in Aotearoa), and in this instance has a strangely distancing function, placing the reception of the natural disaster in the space of a set of references which emphasise a nostalgic stoicism. In Auckland, staying with a friend at the time, I had turned on the two radios in his house and some more of my own, listened to the news reports, and recorded the two-minute silence being simulcast across all stations. 

Shifting around the dial was illuminating : no actual silence was permitted : one station represented silence as birdsong, one as prayer. This recording eventually became the raw material for the installation work modified radio memorial #1 (a fissure in the line of a public silence). Initially captured as a restless browsing of stations which layered the silence into a live radiophonic palimpsest, in its recorded form, the work solidifies the nation-wide radio silence within an edition of 10 lathe cut records, individually cut by Peter King with locked grooves at particular points in the narrative. these ten 'transcriptions' then become idiosyncratic cyclic extensions of the broadcast silence, extending into potential infinity the problematic politics of a truncated, awkward mourning ritual which, in its efforts to find a substitute for a silence which couldn't literally be represented in the mainstream media, includes birdsong, prayer, and the extended diatribes of commercial radio shock jocks.

 

On the 22nd February 2012, this two minute silence was again observed by major commercial and publicstations, indicating an institutionalising of its form of truncated, symbolic mnemonics, tied to a conservative political mindset, within the rituals gathering around the post-earthquake New Zealand cultural landscape. Again, the radio stations broadcast, not silence, but a non-silent analogue: this time, on one station, bagpipes could be heard.

At 12:51 on the 22nd February 2012 I again recorded these radio stations' grazing around the representations of this two minute 'silence' and the radio announcers' framing around it. 

Prior to this I had recorded myself speaking, at roughly eight o'clock, when the official memorial service for the families of those killed in the earthquake was about to start in Christchurch's Latimer Square, about the memories I personally had about being in Wellington at 12:51 on February 22nd 2011, and finding out the earthquake had just happened when walking into a central dealer gallery space whose director knew me and said, "you're from Christchurch, you'd better come and look at this...", and then the ensuing panic and worry around the safety of friends and family, the thoughts about the uncertainly and lack of information coming through.

Later, in the evening, I made dinner. At this dinner were the two friends I had spent the day with exactly a year before, Kim Pieters and Campbell Walker. I asked them, when dinner was finished, to do what I had done in the morning: to spend some time reflecting on the experience a year ago, the memories of which I recorded them speaking around. Immediately after, in their company, I made a small radio memorial with these recordings, which they participated in as listeners. This involved narrowcasting back our three voices, through my mini FM transmitter, to receivers scattered around the large 1903 ballroom we were eating in, speaking from each of our positions of subjectivity about the same set of temporal and spatial factors.

The voices, mixed together live, became an approximate venn diagram of the strange subjectivities of the event, they wove together, touching and not touching each other, speaking to, alongside, and against each other, creating a sound-picture of the event, its rupture, its emotional tone, its practicalities, limitations, and digressive thought-trajectories, for each of us. The voices were then mixed with the radiophonic wash of the day's news reports, struggles to capture what such an event can be understood as, what it can begin to mean, the middle-band fear of silence as 'dead air', the equating of the gravity of such an event to cultural tropes of wartime memorialisation, the problematic political undertones of such a comparison, that had been coming through the airwaves during the day.

To partition memory into a two-minute block which references the ways in which New Zealand culture has dealt with the trauma of the great wars of the 20th Century seems at first odd, and then a highly indicative pointer to the ways in which such a culture continues to be abstracted from such trauma, and also to represent it as monolithic, sealed into a mythic past. As a counterpoint to official memorialisations - which are, arguably, obfuscations - public meanings emptied out of any real personalisation - of an unknowably catastrophic event, the transcription into the airwaves, within the human-scaled radius of a room, a living space, of such deeply personal reflections, provides one model of a counter-memorial which acknowledges the ongoing nature of such events and their inability to be circumscribed, as it also elides the passivity of being merely a receiver of cultural meanings. It arises directly from the deeply felt need for personal ritual and conscious organisation of community, however small, around such events, and references the ways in which the city of Christchurch has itself talked, post-quake - in the need for people to communicate what they have been through in the past year.

Throughout the media silences surrounding the quake and my personal/artistic responses to them I have often thought of the starkly poetic CD "Kenotaphion" by Jonty Semper, a compilation of recordings of all the surviving 2 minute silences at the Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday ceremonies at the Cenotaph in London, from 1929 to 2000. The earliest is from a British Movie-tone newsreel. As one writer put it in a review of Semper's work: "(listeners) will hear... nothing. Or rather, seventy years of collected silences, broken by coughing, shuffling feet, bird song or a child crying", going on to quote Adrian Gregory, a specialist on the history of the Armistice Day commemorations and the author of "The Silence of Memory", as saying "He is releasing it at a peculiarly appropriate time, when the events of September 11 have renewed interest world-wide in the idea of observing a two minute silence as a public affirmation of solidarity. The recordings are records of an absence, the absence of sound, but an absence which is also a highly political presence."

In the spirit of absence as presence, we ended the evening, appropriately enough, with a screening of Bela Tarr's 2011 starkly absurdist fable of impending apocalypse, The Turin Horse...