Rākau

Basement Rākau (2022) is a 16mm hand-processed film by Nova Paul (Ngāpuhi, b.1973, lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau/ Auckland, Aotearoa/ NZ). The black-and-white footage of the trees (the rākau) is developed in wai rākau, a solution made of pūriri leaves – foliage from the trees that are depicted in the work, gathered at the time of shooting – and is conceived of as a cyclic event in which Paul asks the tree to grant her its image, rather than simply ‘taking’ it. Paul therefore considers the work to be not ‘of’ but ‘by’ the trees, speaking directly through an embodied medium. The tree here becomes the teller of pūrākau (stories) – a word deriving from rākau (tree) and pū (base) – that are carriers of ancestral knowledge, rooted in the land and its life force. "The project is a lot about relationships with and within the environment. And for that reason, I say that the tree would give me an image, I wouldn’t take the image—which is a bit of a twist on the colonial gaze and extractive processes that often happen, including in image making, photographic image making, or moving-image making. Once you commit to that idea that you’ll be given the image, and you’re in that space, then it’s not a given that the tree is going to give you the image, is it?" —Nova Paul in conversation with Karl Chitham, Art News Aotearoa, Issue 199, 9 November 2023

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