Endless.

Endless
Te Tuhi Project Wall, Auckland
27 February – 8 May 2022
Presented alongside Desert Strawberries by Mohamed Sleiman Labat

Endless reconstructs a view I see each evening from the window of my home on Otago Harbour in Ōtepoti Dunedin—a plume of smoke rising from the chimney of the Ravensdown factory across the water, where phosphate rock is processed into fertiliser as the sun goes down. Semi-opaque flags hung over the windows hold the foyer in a state of permanent dusk, while a looped video returns the chimney stack to endless production; the chimney appears twice, reflected across a second screen, and in that doubling a divergence opens—the rising smoke and the gulls gliding on the wind are sent shooting in opposite directions. The factory at the centre of the work depends on phosphate imported from Western Sahara, a territory occupied by Morocco since 1975, and in reconstructing this quiet view from my window the installation draws out the distance folded into it—between an agricultural economy in Aotearoa and a Sahrawi population either persecuted within the occupied zone or displaced into refugee camps across the Algerian border.

Running through the space is a sound work developed with Sleiman Labat, a visual artist and poet based in the camps, adapted from his film Desert Strawberries. In it, a recording of his father speaking in Hassaniya disperses memories of nomadic life in Western Sahara before the 1975 invasion among descriptions of the ‘family gardens’ now cultivated in the camps—an initiative of Sleiman Labat’s generation, many of whom studied abroad and returned with the knowledge to grow vegetables in the arid conditions of the Hamada, giving the Sahrawi greater agency over their own food supply and loosening their dependence on humanitarian aid. Two systems of food production are set against one another—one industrial and global, the other familial and intimate—and held in a state of false permanence that finally poses a question: whether the systems of trade and economics we treat as inevitable, and which operate at the cost of others’ basic rights, are inevitable at all.