Te Taniwha

Te Taniwha He toka noa te toka, He r?kau noa te r?kau, Kia t?piri r? an? ki te korero. A rock is only a rock, A tree is only a tree, Until it is imbued with stories . I have spent much of the last few years working with collaborator Richard Niania, kaitiaki of Te Reinga Marae and of the sacred korero (stories) associated with Hine-k?rako. I have photographed sacred sites with Richard’s guidance and we have prepared a series of exhibitions while continuing to collect stories associated with this deity. In the various iterations of this project my photography is entangled with Richard Niania’s text - which is his articulation of the sacred korero he is charged with protecting. Our ultimate intention is to publish a book securing this korero for posterity for the people of Te Reinga at a time when these narratives are threatened by urban and, increasingly, global (trans-Tasman) drift. These are stories of journeying over time, space and generations, of discovery and settlement, migration and return, of people, of water and of eels. The taniwha siblings Hine-k?rako and Rua-mano simultaneously embody the Ruakituri and Hangaroa rivers (which they formed with their bodies), the people of the river vallies (Te Aitanga-?-Pourangahua of the upper Ruakituri Valley, and the Ng?i K?hatu and Ng?ti Hinehika people of the lower Ruakituri at Te Reinga Falls, who are the direct descendants of Hine-Korako) and the eels who, like the taniwha, migrate from the landlocked interior down river to the ocean. Te Taniwha is an articulation of these overlayed narratives and it serves as a model for thinking about scale, interdisciplinarity, the entanglement of sacred and materialist accounts and the primacy of embodied knowledge. The sanctity of some places and things is strong enough that it infuses everything that touches it with some of that quality. I was aware, as was Richard, that sacred objects would result from my attempts to channel the Taniwha’s spirit. The ambrotype and daguerreotype techniques that I have used are open to such channeling, although so is photographic film. The hope is that contact with the sacred, even in a secondary form like photography, might provide the conditions for a kind of truth event – a breaking through of something other than science, capital and, in their sutured form, technology.