Preston, Julieanna and Luiz Dos Santos. Coo-Coo, a warning welcome, a foreboding farewell, a siren [performance video]. (2023). Finding Home: At the nexus of ecological grief, artistic research and environmental justice, Luzern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland, 13 April 2023.
I presented the recently completed moving image work Coo-Coo (2023, 8’ 47”) prefaced by an original spoken poem.
Coo-Coo begs for time to slow, for time to be unhinged from the time-keeping devices that cover up the geological sediments and sentiments of ancestors swept in and out by the forces of tides, winds, wars, and progress, forging a forgetfulness of what is long, deep, enduring, mutating, chanting in the deep belly of mountains and oceans. Coo-Coo exacerbates and pays homage to the call of gulls, pigeons, petrels, shags, gannets, terns and skuas that feed and haunt the caves and rocks: to harken, greet, foretell, muse, warn, farewell, shoo, alarm, and shriek glee, a siren at the mouth of a harbour, watching, sounding, wailing, stumbling, retreating in and out of another mouth.
Coo-Coo is a collaborative site-responsive moving image work by Julieanna Preston produced in collaboration with Luiz dos Santos, sound composer. It was filmed at Tangihanga-a-Kupe, (Mourning of Kupe) where the harbour meets the sea at Whanganui-a-Tara/ Wellington, Aotearoa/ New Zealand. According to Māori stories, its name refers to the reef's similarity to a line of mourners at a tangi, the sad sound of the water around the reef, or Kupe crying for people he left behind in his travels. The work has developed with respect to this indigenous perspective of this place coupled with histories of rock-bound sirens, reef disasters, the Swedish practice of calling herds (külning), the advent of the cuckoo clock, western European notions of time and space, the painting tradition of a lone woman figure in a landscape, widow's walks, light houses, welcoming/farewell greetings to tourist cruise liners, mechanical warning alarm systems, and a personal history with this cave and place over the last twenty-five years. Coo-Coo has developed with the support of Toi Rauwharangi/ College of Creative Arts, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa/ Massey University, in conversation with Te Atiawa and with filming permission from Screen Wellington.
The performative lecture addressed the keys concepts and contextual circumstances that motivated the film, discuss its making process, and offered critical reflection on it as a form of cultural currency in a world in (climate) crisis. Some of the topics touched upon included the myth of home, ‘islandness’ as a trepid state of migrancy, performing as ground/sound, and the (un)settling realities of uncertain tidal movements.
