Between what we see and what we know: Emily Parr’s Through the time spiral: ʻOli ʻUla

The late British writer, John Berger, begins his seminal book Ways of Seeing by thinking through the act of seeing and how it is a precursor to language. He writes, "It is seeing that establishes our place in the surrounding world; we can explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled."⁽¹⁾ Watching Emily Parr’s (Ngāi Te Rangi, Moana, Pākehā) moving image work Through the time spiral: ʻOli ʻUla (2021), I thought a lot about Berger’s words around seeing and knowing, and the ways in which language can illuminate how we see and understand layers of time.

Parr works primarily with moving image, supported by photography, writing, textiles, and whatu. In her work, she utilises moving image as a way to convey the ways in which Indigenous bodies exist in relation to complex, nonlinear constructions of time, space, and place that are continually rebirthed through the ontology of whakapapa—a means of creating layers.⁽²⁾ One of a body of three works that also includes Through the time spiral: Te Muri I (2021) and Through the time spiral: Te Muri II (2022), Through the time spiral: ʻOli ʻUla is the longest and most extensive exploration of Parr’s Tongan, Sāmoan, Portuguese and Jewish whakapapa in the series. In Through the time spiral: ʻOli ʻUla, Te Puna Te Wai Ariki (the spring of Waiariki) in Tāmaki Makaurau acts as kind of time portal, enabling Parr to return to the past and imagine the former homestead of her great-great-grandparents, ‘Oli ‘Ula, from which the work takes its name. Built in 1902 beside the Wai Ariki spring at 9 Eden Crescent, ‘Oli ‘Ula was the home of Gustav Kronfeld, a Jewish merchant, and Louisa Silveira of Lotofaga, Sāmoa, and their ten children. Named after the fragrant red flower of the Sāmoan ‘oli tree, it was a beautiful two-storey house with twenty-something rooms, wide balconies, stained-glass windows and measina-adorned walls. Torn down in 1976, the site where ‘Oli ‘Ula once stood is now a car park, next to the University of Auckland’s law school and the High Court building. The puna is still visible though, spouting out of a brick wall.

Parr’s film begins and ends with a long, static shot of this trickling water, framed by lush green creepers. Known as Wai Ariki, or chiefly waters, this sacred puna was an essential source of water for generations of Māori prior to European settlement, and afterwards supplied both Māori and early settlers during the infancy of the city of 'Auckland'. In this first shot we see bricks, crumbling and white, and the yellowing moss, bushy vines and ferns that have almost subsumed an opening where water trickles out. We hear its gentle bubble and flow, before the voice of the artist interrupts. Parr explains how this area was once a headland, Te Rerenga Ora Iti, which was quarried to make 'reclaimed' land along the waterfront. Parr describes the waters and taniwha that exist beneath the concrete, built over to create the skyscrapers that commuters now walk amongst in downtown Tāmaki Makaurau. These changes in the landscape act as markers of, or witnesses to, different senses of time—in the artist’s terms, as time spirals—a way of mapping memories. Parr then locates us near the University of Auckland, but as she says, depending on "where in the time spiral you are," we are also at the home of her great-great-grandparents.

The complicated takarangi (a kind of double or spiral within a spiral) of these histories and the way Parr has wrapped them together might begin in some ways with the marriage of Louisa and Gustav in Vava‘u, Tonga, in August 1883. Louisa Silveira was born to a Sāmoan mother and Portuguese father, but was orphaned and raised in a Catholic convent at Savalalo, near Apia. Her future husband was born into a German Jewish family in Thorn in Eastern Prussia, now known as Toruń, in modern day Poland. As a young man, Gustav Kronfeld migrated to Australia, then Sāmoa, where he worked for a trading company. Settling in Tonga, the couple had five of their ten children, before moving to Tāmaki Makaurau. In 1890, the couple set up the G. Kronfeld trading company, shipping fruit, copra (the dried, white flesh of the coconut from which coconut oil is extracted) and other cargo between Aotearoa and Sāmoa. Following the outbreak of the First World War, Gustav—a German citizen—was designated an ‘enemy alien’ and subsequently interned on Te Motu-a-Ihenga. Unlike many others, however, Gustav was allowed to remain in Aotearoa with his whānau after the war, and died at ‘Oli ‘Ula in 1924.⁽³⁾ Louisa passed away in 1939, but not before gifting the family collection of taonga and measina to the city’s public museum, now housed by Te Papa.⁽⁴⁾

In her voiceover, Parr walks us through the house and gardens, her narrative assembled from the recorded memories of Moe, her great-uncle and Gustav and Louisa’s eighth child, and those of Moe’s son Tony. Onscreen, the image shifts to a different view of the contemporary landscape, now overlaid with a series of drawings Parr has made of the house and of her whānau. We see only a white outline of ‘Oli ‘Ula, as plants move gently with the  breeze. Parr imagines us as entering the house, and how we "...might see Louisa at the gate, who has paused to wait for the man who has followed her home to come from within reach of her umbrella. Once he does, she whacks him around the ears and says, 'How dare you follow me! If we were in Samoa you would be horsewhipped'." The image then changes to a four-storey building made of red brick, with arched windows and cream, unfluted corinthian pillars. Parr has taken us to the Kronfeld warehouse at 10 Customs Street, an imposing edifice in Tāmaki Makaurau's historic Britomart Precinct; she describes the goods it houses that will be shipped between Aotearoa and the Pacific islands. Another drawing appears overlaid on the facade of the warehouse, this time of a letter dated 28^th November, 1914. It is a facsimile of a memorandum to the Solicitor General of New Zealand, and concerns Gustav’s 'suspicious' communications with a fellow German national while travelling in Apia. The warehouse would be confiscated following Gustav's internment.

We return to ‘Oli ‘Ula, following Moe’s memories around the house to the backyard. Later on, the   backdrop changes to a siapo (mulberry bark cloth, also known as tapa), recently found folded up in Parr’s family home and likely to have been used at ‘Oli ‘Ula. Her narration now tracks through the home’s floor plan, describing its many rooms in detail from a drawing "by Olive Solomon née Kronfeld." She invites us to step out onto the verandah, and to look out at Waitematā Harbour. Parr imagines the family left at ‘Oli ‘Ula looking out towards Gustav on Te Motu-a-Ihenga, and Gustav looking back towards them and the lights of the city. Describing an empty rocking chair, Parr notes that "no one dares to sit on [it] when he’s [not] there."

There is joy and tenderness in the way Parr walks us through her great-great-grandparents home, noting the walls covered in taonga and measina, the two portraits of rangatira Māori commissioned by Gustav for Gottfried Lindauer, which hang in the hall. I wonder if perhaps these rangatira are connected to Parr through her Māori whakapapa. In this room, we hear about an intruder who enters Louisa’s bedroom through the verandah, only to be chased out of the house by her sons. This specific story has an unnerving quality and while Parr assures us that everything is okay, its inclusion is particularly foreboding. Threaded through the work is also a more difficult sense of the loss experienced by the Kronfeld whānau—the injustice and whakamā around Gustav’s internment, and, as we later learn, how their youngest child Tui died during this time. The film concludes with Parr telling us to go outside again to the spring, to "those sacred waters." We are taken back to the bricks and the vines and the gap where Te Wai Ariki flows, while birds are heard in the distance.

For Parr, Te Wai Ariki has sentience and mauri, and in this work she acknowledges its rhythm, thus reorienting the linear narratives inherent in western conceptions of time. The viewer is grounded not just to place, but also to deeper understandings of time. Time may be a continuous stream, but it is not linear; it is a patchwork that holds many stories.⁽⁵⁾ In this way, Te Wai Ariki is the basis of the su‘ifefiloi methodology that Parr utilises in her storytelling, an interpretation of the Sāmoan tradition of making flower garlands, in which flowers are sewn together and strung into a necklace called an ‘ula. The etymology of the word su‘ifefiloi can be broken down as su‘i meaning to sew, and fefiloi meaning mixture.⁽⁶⁾ Su‘ifefiloi are created using a mixture of flowers, building a patchworked surface out of many pieces that holds together a number of different voices and ideas.⁽⁷⁾ The construction of memory is inherent within this conceptualisation of su‘ifefiloi, which also speaks to the limitations of accessing a singular understanding of the 'past'.

In Through the time spiral: ʻOli ʻUla, the takarangi is a time spiral between which we can glimpse the beginning of all life—the separation of Ranginui and Papatūānuku. Its loop is an opening through which to contemplate how many histories converge, and how Parr has brought together different moments in time. At one point in the film, she  recounts an anecdote in which a clock was broken, and tells us how a visitor staying at ‘Oli ‘Ula tries to fix it, but is unsuccessful. This is the work of the takarangi, reminding us that time is not linear, that time is a continuous stream that reverberates in unexpected ways. We hear how travellers from across the Pacific were often invited to stay at ‘Oli ‘Ula by Gustav and Louisa, and, through this hospitality, were able to establish roots in Tāmaki Makaurau at a time when there were not many Sāmoans in Aotearoa. As in her reconstruction of Moe and Tony’s memories, Parr’s restoration of this narrative further demonstrates that, in the words of Marxist geographer David Harvey, "neither time or space can be assigned objective meanings independent of material processes."⁽⁸⁾ Harvey reminds us that the material reality of history is always subjective and interrelated to the way events unfold. For instance, the messages that travelled between postal censors and military authorities, the Kronfeld whānau and the government, Te Motu-a-Ihenga and ‘Oli ‘Ula, all survived in the archives of Parr’s whānau, and more broadly within the history of Aotearoa, and thus appear in the work. Bringing the words of her whanau into the present tense and linking these memories with her own speech, Parr “threads flowers onto the ‘ula”, revealing the takarangi that exists between the past, present, and future.⁽⁹⁾ In doing so, Parr holds together the voices of many, and uses her film to articulate the ways in which architecture produces space. With her body and speech as conduit, she links the wairua of her tūpuna, whose bodies may be long deceased, to her own, and to the histories of moana migration to Aotearoa.

Parr’s research into the history of her whanau was complicated by the death of her Nana (Gustav and Louisa’s granddaughter), which was—as it would be for all of us—a moment of grief in which we start to wonder about the people who came before us, to wonder what it might be to look through the time spiral. The act of drawing is a physical manifestation of layering and a way for the artist to connect to these memories. It is this process of layering that speaks to the meaning of the word whakapapa at its most expansive. Often referred to as "genealogy," whakapapa contains  this idea of whānau past, present and future, but more specifically, it describes an action that means "layer upon layer." Whakapapa could be described as "to make layers," or "generative," and describes a kind of web or spiral. The word itself is made up of the causative prefix 'whaka' and the stem word 'papa', with a literal meaning of ground or layer, in turn calling to mind the Earth mother—Papatūānuku.⁽¹⁰⁾ It is the idea that there are always seeds that thread through us, which, like the different flowers threaded onto the ʻula, form a whole that is patchworked, wide-ranging, and never settled.⁽¹¹⁾ Thinking with this idea of a time spiral, as well as the act of suʻifefiloi, I was drawn to the concept of the vā and how this shapes Parr’s approach to making. Within Samoan cosmology, the vā is described in many ways: it speaks to the interconnectedness of everything—environments, histories, genealogies, beings—held together by a shared responsibility and relationships. It is the past, present and future, and thereby connects us to everything that has ever been and everything that ever will be. The vā acts as a 'coupling knot', where the processes of mavae (to unfold, spread) and tofiga (to gather and appoint) entwine and connect relationships as alaga (spatial, relational and geographical networks).⁽¹²⁾ These alaga exist within the vā, and have always connected the artist across time and space to her great-great-grandparents and the stories remembered by the flow of the water in Te Wai Ariki.

In this way, Through the time spiral: ʻOli ʻUla demonstrates an understanding of what artist Emily Karaka has described as Indigenous people’s capacity to hold "timeless knowledge, so it belongs in the past, the present, and the future—so it must have the capacity to move."⁽¹³⁾ In Parr’s work, we see the way whakapapa acts as a takarangi, looping through the coupling knots of su‘ifefiloi in order to create a convergence of time, space, and place. Te Wai Ariki, as witness, watches as we follow Parr’s voice as she attempts to construct another way of seeing the past. Parr offers a patchwork of layers by which we can piece together the traces of not just her tūpuna, but those of the artist herself. Although Berger reminds us that the relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled, through the language of her ancestors, Parr articulates the many ways in which it might be possible to see ourselves and understand our links to the past in the present, through the time spiral.

Emily Parr's Through the Time Spiral: ʻOli ʻUla (2021) was on view in Artspace Aotearoa's online screening room from 2 to 29 September 2024.