Rua Kōhatu | Two Stones

  • with Jake Kīanō Skinner (Ngāti Rangitihi, Tūhoe)

  • Single Channel Video
  • Masons Screen
  • Circuit Artist Moving Image
  • Wellington
  • March 2024

Selected for the BFI London Film Festival and the Wairoa Māori Film Festival.

  • Images: Noel Meek

In this film, musicians Jake Kīanō Skinner (Ngāti Rangitihi, Tūhoe) and Noel Meek explore their long-running relationship through a shared musical material, stone. Commonly used in the taonga pūoro that Skinner practices and also within the experimental musical traditions that Meek inhabits, both artists consider the lithic as  actants and collaborators in their music.

In their relational approach to stone, the artists look to the strata of history. Hone Tuwhare’s poetry is a key influence, in particular his 'Thoughts On A Sufi Proverb' which is quoted in the film. Further layers are gathered from the pūrākau that describe the formation of Ngā Kohatu Whakarakaraka o Tamatea Pōkai Whenua / The Port Hills, where the film was shot. In one pūrākau, the hills are formed from an act of violence by Māui, who smothers a vanquished giant in stones, and in another, by Tūterakiwhanoa piling up the sweepings of the Canterbury Plains. The music created by Skinner and Meek reflects these accumulations of history and mythology in the landscape, of stone upon stone.

Text from "Thoughts On A Sufi Proverb" by Hone Tuwhare (Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Korokoro, Ngāti Tautahi, Te Popote, Uri-o-Hau). Reproduced from Small Holes In The Silence with kind permission of Rob Tuwhare and the Hone Tuwhare Trust.

“The stones seem to be giving voice to the landscape—recalling Meek’s earlier conversations with the environment—in a collaboration that highlights the artists’ concern for constructive, bicultural relationships. From the perspective of the anthropocene, the work conveys a desire to communicate with, or give voice to, nature at a time when the environmental issues facing humanity seem insurmountable. Tuwhare’s poem is layered throughout the work like strata, evoking the deep layers of history embedded in the whenua of Aotearoa. In it, we are given visions of the dark side of the moon, and the erosion of rock, crumbling to sand and eventually ancestral dust: a deep time that eclipses the span of human existence.” 
     Bronwyn Holloway-Smith 

Commissioned by CIRCUIT and Wellington City Council.