Saga
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‘Saga’ is an ultra-short film about my view of Wellington. As an exchange student from the Netherlands I have only been in this city very briefly so far (a bit over two weeks). It has been a whirlwind of experiences and a very exciting time. At the same time this semester connects directly to my last one, meaning I have been working on school assignments non-stop since last Christmas. I can sometimes feel tired and featherbrained, out of control of the situation.
During this hectic time, I took some time off to visit Te Papa with some new-made friends. There I learned about the history of New Zealand. Something that struck me then was that New Zealand has been devoid of humans for much of its history. The first settlers arrived here from Eastern Polynesia approx. 750 years ago (sometime between 1250 and 1300) (Wilmshurst, 2008). Although that is long ago, it is not that long, compared to other places. For example, the oldest human remains found in the Netherlands are more than 250.000 years old (Vos, 2008). Your neighbor Australia was another landmass that was relatively late to be settled, but this happened 50.000 years ago (Moodly, 2009)!
Thus, New Zealand has always been an exciting new port for travelers from faraway lands: Polynesian explorers, European colonists, and eventually Dutch design students. My film draws a parallel between my experience in New Zealand and that of the island itself. I have tried to express the briefness of my presence in this city through the briefness of the city’s presence on this island. I have also tried to suggest the feelings of excitement, volatility and disorder by designing a distinct soundscape. Hopefully it gets across the notion that the story of New Zealand is a very long one, but that New Zealanders only appear in a very short scene towards the end. In that sense this film is a critical look at the impact we as humans have on our environment. One could extrapolate the parallel even further, past the arrival of the student in the city, past the arrival of the city on the island, and look at the arrival of the human on the planet. Look at how drastically our presence changes the landscape, and how our point of view can distort the extent of that impact on the scale of our existence.
I wonder whether Wellington feels as I feel right now. And I wonder what the future holds.
Sources
Moodley, Y., Linz, B., Yamaoka, Y., Windsor, H. M., Breurec, S., Wu, J. Y., … Achtman, M. (2009). The peopling of the Pacific from a bacterial perspective. Science (New York, N.Y.), 323(5913), 527–530. doi:10.1126/science.1166083
Munroe, R. (2016). Earth Temperature Timeline. Retrieved from: https://xkcd.com/1732/
Vos, P. & Kiden, P. De landschapsvorming tijdens de steentijd, in: J. Deeben et al. (red) (2008), De steentijd in Nederland, Archeologie 11/12, (Meppel), 7. doi:10.17026/dans-xz8-btyd
Wilmshurst, J. M., Anderson, A. J., Higham, T. F., & Worthy, T. H. (2008). Dating the late prehistoric dispersal of Polynesians to New Zealand using the commensal Pacific rat. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(22), 7676–7680. doi:10.1073/pnas.0801507105
Munroe, R. (2016). Earth Temperature Timeline. Retrieved from: https://xkcd.com/1732/
Vos, P. & Kiden, P. De landschapsvorming tijdens de steentijd, in: J. Deeben et al. (red) (2008), De steentijd in Nederland, Archeologie 11/12, (Meppel), 7. doi:10.17026/dans-xz8-btyd
Wilmshurst, J. M., Anderson, A. J., Higham, T. F., & Worthy, T. H. (2008). Dating the late prehistoric dispersal of Polynesians to New Zealand using the commensal Pacific rat. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(22), 7676–7680. doi:10.1073/pnas.0801507105