The South Pacific as dream sequence

'South Pacific' is the prescribed regionalism of the Pacific Islands; a colonial fantasy; place constructed by trade routes, European and US voyagers, and the events of World War 2, which connected the Islands interminably. Framed by grainy, opening and closing footage of the ocean, and overlayed with subtitles which flow across the screen in the rhythm of a net chat, Stella Brennan’s South Pacific explores narratives about place that have impacted upon the region from the outside, and flowed in.

The images in the work actually come from three sources and continue with Brennan’s ongoing interest in antiquated technologies: their revelation and precise dating of utopian thought; the ways in which their re-presentation can refigure and warp persistently operative modernist frameworks for seeing and reading places and events, histories and artifacts. The grainy intro and outro is filmed off the nose camera of a passenger jet, as videoed off the jet’s inflight entertainment system. The radar images were filmed from an antiquated harbour radar machine at the Auckland maritime museum. The ultrasound images were made by immersing a model plane - a bockscar, the plane that bombed Nagasaki, which came to Brennan packaged with a model atomic bomb - in water. The water creates images like sonar pictures; the explosions are handfuls of sand being dropped in front of the probe. This was the clever suggestion of Brennan’s husband and collaborator Dr David Perry, who is a radiologist.

I love how illusory and poetic the narrative voice of this work is, switching from one kind of omniscient position to another (plane passenger, Islander, the non-human landscape) in different ways sympathetic and sensitive to a diverse set of actors, observers, and ecologies involved in the periods and events invoked. Brennan dedicated South Pacific to her neighbour, who was an aerial photographer with Australian forces in Rabaul during WW2 and who showed her the photos he took of the Japanese surrender there. While seemingly short in length, South Pacific took 18 months to create: Brennan struggled with the challenge of transporting fascinating factual information in to artistic form, while swerving the domain and impact of a social studies project. The text that remains is a gathering of fragments: from stories people have told her about the war, including the aerial photographer, but also Bill Sevisi, a very famous Samoan/ NZ Hawaiian Steel guitarist who imparted the story about learning tunes off the shortwave radio; image and document research such as the U-boat log, which was found in the New Plymouth Library collection; research on personally puzzling artifacts from the period, such as the mine at Mokau and the radio station at Musick point; as well as narratives and language play that have been extended or interpolated for poetic effect. The simple, fairly obvious device of a dream sequence successfully ties these many voices, histories, ponderings together; the plane passenger traverses South Pacific space in a disparate, and episodic, fitful temporality of dreaming and waking.

Thanks to Stella for speaking about the work in more detail with me. There are two great essays on Stella Brennan's practice by Robert Leonard and Sean Cubbitt in the monograph O----------10. Robert's essay, 'History Curator' is available online here.