family – RM Moving Image Archive

Natalie Tozer

Title: Footpath Fossil (breathe)
Year: 2020
Length: 20:26
Format: Looped H265 10bit,
Credits: Director: Natalie Tozer
Director of Photography & Editor: Sam Tozer
Original Soundtrack: Paul Rhodes

My work documents exposed urban stratigraphy. I look for layers that aren’t meant to be seen. Curbside ruins. Crumbled footpaths. Potholes. These layers are visible histories of life/nonlife entangled within the ground. I interpret these small moments in our urban landscape as interruptions to capitalist strategies. Mythically and metaphorically rich, the ground provides us with clues, knowledge, refuge as well as the sunken networks of extraction, exploitation and disposal. The ground is active, generous and vulnerable. We lace it with tar seal, concrete and gravel; stone blasted and rendered for our urban environments. I see my practice as a way to read and understand the ground as the surface to a complex underland . By collecting, documenting and deciphering the findings, I hope to gather enough data to learn something. I like to reach out in the dark, to gaze into a possible future and let the practice reveal the rest.

This year, I have filmed broken footpaths near and around Karangahape Rd, Tāmaki Makaurau. The markings from tools and previous layers of broken grout lie exposed for interpretation like messages from the underland lurching upwards eager to be seen.The recent COVID19 rahui brought repair and construction of the footpath to a halt. During this lull in productivity and progress I captured footage which now acts as a fossil record. I want to show through the work that I deeply admire the well- used areas we travel through. I want to acknowledge and contemplate the beauty of its worn complexity and explore the idea that meaningful production should be a subset of ‘care’. This approach is about revealing the alternative strategies against capitalist modes of production, where we focus on tending and caring for what we have, instead of perpetuating in an ever-expanding frenzy.

The rahui gave me and my nine-year-old daughter Penelope time to walk around our neighborhood, where she carefully acted as a pathfinder and navigational keeper of our mutual discovery. Together, we found and surveyed small poetic moments of urban decay, some of which will never be fixed, remaining arrested in time just the way they are. These places are entanglements where the underground reaches through the ever-expanding mask of concrete, the mark of empire building since the Roman times. For me, these walks enact soft lines of experience and memory, weaving relational becomings in common worlds. They are perspectives on Life and Nonlife, and the offer of coexistence. Through exploring and striving to understand I try to invite the possibility of symbiotic and improbable collaborations into my practice and relationships.

Perhaps in years to come, this geontological learning and speculation will emerge into the next generation through Penelope. I smile when she unearths small findings from the curb, lichen encrusted tar seal crumbles. Like finding a perfect shell on a storm swept beach, she collects and clutches her find all the way home to show me. A small offering from the messy entangled ground.

Thematic tags: Documentary, capitalism, environment/ecology, abstraction, sound, family

Title: Soothsayer
Year: 2018
Length: 03:50
Format: 4K looped video
Credits: Director: Natalie Tozer, Director of Photography & Editor: Sam Tozer

The gentle, calming nature of this work establishes a contrast with the severity of social and environmental realities today. A meditative kaleidoscopic loop of destruction aims to scale potential future outcomes into a series of digestible alternative offerings. This video work slowly crushes folded paper ‘fortune tellers’; cootie catchers, chatterboxes, whirlybirds or paku-paku. Hand folded paper objects used by children, manipulating folds to predict the future based on decisions made by the one seeking their fortune. The self destructing geometric paper structures talk to the ephemeral nature of all human construction. The child places faith in a paper object and constructs a hopeful and naive vision of the future; as humanity has, for so long, assumed its continued good fortune and permanence on earth. The work aims to pitch alternative narratives through image worlds and seeks out some of the deepest possibilities and consequences of human construction and destruction.

Thematic tags: Environment/ecology, abstraction, geological time, deep time, future fossils

Nat Tozer is an artist and experimental film maker based in Tāmaki Makaurau, working with paper, sculpture and video. Recent shows include Emerging Artists Show, Sanderson Gallery and Salted Earth, Sosage Gallery. Her work has been selected for Guangzhou Art Fair, Femisphere Zine, Headland Sculpture on the Gulf Pavilion, Art in the Dark; cinema entry, the Wallace Arts Trust, several Walker and Hall finalists exhibitions and a Summer Scholarship by the University of Auckland. Natalie holds a PGDipFA with distinction and is currently studying her MFA at Elam School of Fine Arts. She produces a range of events and media at LOT23 Studio and has been a guest curator for Q Theatre, Art Ache, Sky your TV and Threaded Magazine. She is the founder of the artists run gallery mothermother, which seeks modes of curatorial activism.

natalietozer.com, @nattozer
mothermother.co.nz, @mothermother_archive
lot23.co.nz, @lot23studio

Tessa Russell

Title: You ripped out my mother tongue
Year: 2018
Length: 04:38
Credits: Tessa Russell
The work is of my mother’s journey without Te Reo Māori and it’s purpose is to raise awareness of the intergenerational trauma language loss can cause. It’s probably the most important piece of mahi I have ever put together in my life, because it’s not just her story. It’s my nanny’s, it’s mine, it’s my daughter’s, it’s New Zealand’s. This is OUR country’s history, this is OUR country’s language, so this is all of OUR responsibility to save it.
Thematic tags: Decoloniality, family, history, indigenous methodologies.

Tessa Russell’s practice is predominantly in photography and video. She utilizes her art to explore issues that affect her whānau, hapu, iwi, and community. Proud of both her Māori and Scottish ancestral lines, she understands the importance of adding her voice to conversations as an indigenous wahine and māmā.

www.moemoeacollective.com

Louise Stevenson

Title: In Conversation with the Architect
Year: 2012
Length: 18.00
Format: Digital video

Documentary like, this work re-visits a recorded conversation with Stevenson’s then ninety year old father, Charles Stevenson, about the King George Sixth Secondary School in Honiara, Solomon Islands which he designed in 1964. He was an architect in the British Colonial Service in Nigeria and Solomon Islands during the 1950s to 1970s and played a key role in the implementation of modern infrastructure in those tropical colonies. In the film, their discussion is enacted through their hands pointing to more recent footage of the buildings fifty years later in 2011, while an edited text of their dialogue runs in parallel to this. Perspectives on colonial history and national independence weave through the conversation between father and daughter highlighting generational shifts and memory slippage. The work considers issues at stake in the inter-relationship between spoken word and materiality via conversation, architectural history and representational film imagery. Stevenson discusses this work in her paper (Re)constructing Tropical Architecture in Solomon Islands: Conversations with my Father,” Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 24:2, 214-243
Thematic tags: Documentary, body, decoloniality, history, family, architecture, modernism.

Louise Stevenson’s practice spans broadly across drawing, painting, installation, photography and film. Her work predominantly engages with the position of being “outside” and a shifting relationship to place. She draws on non-Western ideas of navigation that locate a floating-fixed position on the Ocean. The formative experience of growing up as an expatriate in Honiara, Solomon Islands, as well as travelling and living in Europe, informs this interest. Projects include drawing series related to living in Budapest, Hungary, paintings exploring transparency and opacity, installations working with objects and materials referencing memory, and photographic and film work exploring the legacy of modern architecture in the tropics (includes MFA and Doctoral work).

Archival material, along with associated personal histories and their intersection with the public domain, informs Stevenson’s more recent work. An ongoing project involves the research and visual exploration of a substantial photographic archive gifted to Stevenson by her father who was an architect in the British Colonial service in Nigeria and Solomon Islands. This archive records tropical modern architecture’s trajectory from Africa to the Pacific, and a particular geo-political era of colonial and modernist history. Stevenson’s work attempts to re-represent this history within a framework of shifting perspectives while holding the irresolvable space of colonial history. Several projects stem from this research with on-going multi-form presentations across photography, film, installation and writing.

louisestevenson.net