Asynchrony of the Lambs: Frances Libeau’s Lake of Wandering Spirits

"I crept up into the barn. I was so scared to look inside, but I had to.
" 
"And what did you see, Clarice? What did you see?"
 
"Lambs. The lambs were screaming.
" 
— The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Livestock officers from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries descend upon a flock of sheep at a quarantine station near Lake Rotomahana. The weight of each sheep is collected and wool clippings are recorded before the slaughter takes hold. The hardest sound to listen to is the thin snap-snap-snap of the bolt gun. The impact remains off-camera, obscured behind a crossbeam and all the more obscene for its concealment. Then the grim document dissolves into dissonant noise—bush, blood, smoke, submersion—as the snap-snap-snap lingers on, marking each cut in the montage. An underwater burble. Fade to black.

Order returns. Earthmovers scrape and heave. Dogs bark. Men grumble. Dirt falls into a mass grave. A man overseeing the burial smiles at the camera. Tea break. Back in the yard, a single sheep evades death. It darts between grasping hands. “He’s determined, that prick.” The image returns: the same animal now runs free. Through digital compositing, this brief liberation is sustained as a loop atop a field of rippling water. Static. Colour bars. Repeat.

The above is a brief synopsis of the most immediately arresting component of Frances Libeau’s diffuse Te Tuhi exhibition Lake of Wandering Spirits: a ten-minute, twenty-five-second looped video collage, compiled from archival footage, and projected through a large transparent screen tethered to the floor and ceiling by six lengths of butcher belt. Accompanying the projection is a CRT monitor positioned at the gallery’s edge, forming the second channel of the exhibition’s eponymous artwork.  It scrolls teleprompter-style through Libeau’s written speculations on the footage, interspersed with charmingly graphic title cards whose hand-drawn letterforms suggest a sparkling display of logophilic fireflies.

Nearby, a blue X is spray-painted onto the wall, while a prolapse needle pins a roll of gun-cleaning cloth to a wooden milk crate. Outside the main gallery space, a second pairing—Blue Bolt/Killer Storm—extends the installation. A CRT monitor presents a demonstration of the bolt guns used in the cull, appropriated from the same 1978 source footage as Lake of Wandering Spirits. Atop another milk crate, the exposed guts of a cassette of Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside (1978) echoes the logic of this weapon demonstration video. Across the wall above, a scattering of tracking tags, Watermarks 1, completes the network of pastoral images and objects.

In this exhibition, the inherent linearity of the moving image—the steady ticking over of frames—is framed to echo the “settled” logic of the colonial past. Its disruption through multiplication becomes Libeau’s means of working against that settlement.^[1] Projected onto and through a translucent screen, the video produces a fractured field of visibility rather than a stable image. The viewer cannot approach it as they would a conventional screen—from the front. At the same time, the projection disperses across multiple surfaces, reflected onto the rear wall while passing through the suspended screen onto another. This layered arrangement enmeshes the spectator within the work’s spatial logic, a disquiet that intensifies during sequences of animal distress, when the difficulty of looking becomes inseparable from the act itself.[2]

In emphasising the schism between sound and vision through a focus on desynchronisation—“THE SOUND RUNS ALMOST A WHOLE SECOND BEHIND THE PICTURE,” reads the commentary—Libeau also draws attention to the video specificity of their source material.^[3] Video, unlike earlier filmic systems, made synchronised image and sound more accessible, immediate, and consumer-friendly, particularly in domestic and amateur contexts. This is home video violence from our own back yard.

The project was catalysed by Libeau’s discovery, in Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga Archives New Zealand, of Portapak footage depicting the culling of 5,000 sheep to contain a scrapie outbreak, shot by an unknown cameraperson over three days in August 1978. The archival focus on 5,000 sheep raises a broader question of scale: some 20 million sheep and lambs are killed in Aotearoa New Zealand each year. This methodical violence has been taken up in cultural works such as the Skeptics’ A.F.F.C.O. (1987), Jonathan King’s horror-comedy Black Sheep (2006), and, in part, Australian collective Soda Jerk’s Terror Nullius (2018) (which appropriates footage from Black Sheep). Across these works, sheep function as a compressed emblem of New Zealand culture.^[4] They are typically read less as critiques of meat eating than as critiques of nationalism.

It is this content which, for me, hinges Libeau’s Lake of Wandering Spirits to Jonathan Demme’s film adaptation of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs (1991). To describe Demme’s work as merely a cat-and-mouse thriller would shortchange its Gothic architecture, in which American colonial violence—figured most explicitly through “Buffalo Bill”—is sublimated through institutional systems of forensic and military knowledge, dispersed across archives and classification systems. To describe Libeau’s work as being “about sheep” would be similarly reductive. At the level of form, the question is not only what these images represent, but how they are reconfigured through repetition and editorial return.

Rearranging pre-recorded footage exerts a particular pull for artists intent on staging a dialogue between past and present. The French re-monter, notes film scholar Alison Smith, names not only the reassembly of existing images into a new sequence, but also the broader meaning of retracing or “working backwards”.^[5] In appropriation video, the archival fragment often stands in for a hegemonic past, its authority subjected to the cuts, loops, and abrasions of editing. We restage history to understand today. When the subject is nationhood, what better image of Aotearoa than a sea of sheep being murdered one by one?

To this end, Lake of Wandering Spirits invites speculation about the cameraperson’s relation to the cull. Libeau notes, in the teleprompter scroll, the sound of sniffing behind the camera—a trace that suggests sympathy for the animals, though it is difficult to imagine witnessing such scenes without it. Yet the footage’s patient attention to the bolt gun’s demonstration in Blue Bolt/Killer Storm, and its resigned gaze over the loose sheep, implies a more complicit involvement. For what purpose has this footage been recorded, and does that purpose alter the meanings it produces when reassembled for an art gallery public nearly fifty years later?

These questions point to a broader tension in the act of appropriation itself: even the most careful interventions remain entangled in the structures they seek to unsettle. The Hollywood term “found footage” already implies a position of authority—the artist as discoverer, the one who assigns value to what was previously overlooked.

Yet even the most careful acts of appropriation remain entangled in the structures they seek to unsettle. The Hollywood term “found footage” already implies a position of authority: the artist as discoverer, the one who assigns value to what was previously overlooked. More troubling is whether reordering alone can free these images from the meanings that first shaped them. The question is not simply what the work reveals, but what it repeats: does bringing these images out of the archive redirect their force, or does it reproduce a familiar cultural cringe calibrated for contemporary spectators?

In Lake of Wandering Spirits, however, it is not the scale of animal death that compels attention, but the conditions that render such violence available to representation. This historical culling is therefore pre-empted by its own media record. Lake of Wandering Spirits exists reflexively through the disruption of this mediatisation—invention via vandalism. By dissecting the raw material of an administrative document, Libeau summons a network of postcolonial protection myths: sovereignty, security, economy.

The text commentary component of Lake of Wandering Spirits intensifies this disruption by presenting the work alongside its own unfolding commentary, a clear argument that, in spite of the archive’s supposed objectivity, it is not possible to access these materials without feeling some sort of emotional response to what you uncover. Observational fragments—“THERE IS ONE WOMAN. THE CAMERA FOLLOWS HER CLOSELY”—sit beside speculative digressions, including extended intertextual references to Kate Bush. This oscillation between description and reflection renders interpretation visible rather than seamless. Authorship is asserted through this structuring voice, but also destabilised because the work reframes interpretation not as neutral exegesis, but as part of the material it stages, presenting meaning as something continuously generated rather than stable.

At the conclusion, the collage film’s most deliberately constructed and sustained image—the lone sheep running across water—offers a reprieve from this nationalist ennui. In the ensemble of voices comprising Lake of Wandering Spirits, this image sings the loudest. Through their commentary, Libeau identifies with this figure, writing: “THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE ENDING TO THE STORY OF THE SHEEP AT CRATER BLOCK—ONE THAT I PREFER”. To understand what this image might signify, I turn to Erika Balsom’s description of ‘the oceanic feeling’ as “a quasi-sublime state in which the integrity of the self is lost, or at least compromised, in a sense of limitlessness, unboundedness, and interconnectedness.”[6]

In this sense, the unbounded ocean, performed here by Lake Rerewhakaaitu, suggests a space in which the ordering logics of property, nation, and administrative violence momentarily lose their grip. The lone sheep thus becomes a figure of escape, a kind of catharsis, a bloodletting through the tracking issues of video tape.

“Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?”