Empty Vessels.

Empty Vessels
With Desert Narratives by Mohamed Sleiman Labat
Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery, Hastings
9 December 2023 – 10 March 2024

Empty Vessels and Desert Narratives take up Aotearoa’s reliance on phosphate rock from Western Sahara: a resource processed into fertiliser that partly fuels the country’s high-performing agricultural industry, and one controlled through Morocco’s occupation of the territory, which has displaced the Sahrawi from their land. The two-part exhibition is a dialogue between two artists—one working in Aotearoa, one in the Sahrawi refugee camps of the Algerian desert—who have maintained a correspondence since meeting in 2016.

My contribution began in 2022, while living in Ōtepoti Dunedin, when I started recording the movement of the ships that carry this phosphate from Western Sahara to the Otago peninsula—vessels that first make landfall at Ahuriri, the port of Napier, before continuing south. The resulting installation traces those crossings and sets alongside them ten years of shipping data, which begins to suggest that, under growing public pressure over the ethics of the trade, the fertiliser company Ravensdown may be moving away from the region.

Its counterpart is Desert Narratives, an experimental documentary by Sleiman Labat filmed from within the camps, which follows the same rock in the opposite direction—drawing together the story of phosphate and of growing food in the desert through the movement of sand particles, plants, and displaced people and minerals, and setting indigenous ways of knowing and being against the colonial and environmental violence of mineral extraction.