The Gift

The Gift - Scarborough, UK 2014. (Production Still) Photo: Tariq Emam.

Participatory Performance and single-screen video

Commissioned by Lara Goodband for UK national touring exhibition Sea Swim: Head Above Water (2015-16)

The Gift was first performed on a beach near the mouth of the Whanganui river, on the North Island of New Zealand. This was in 2013, a year before the historic court ruling that recognized the inseparability of the river from the Whanganui Maori – for whom ‘‘Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au’ (I am the river and the river is me)’ (Grear & Kotzé 2015, p.302).

This work was developed at a time when I was working out how the “more-than-human” could be admitted into participatory art – both as a concept, and as a way of asking “who else takes part?”, other than humans. The Maori cosmology does not divide people from the things that might be called elsewhere “natural” things: mountains, trees, or the water that forms the river itself. The world produced by Maori culture, links specific examples of these things with the people who live among them, and considers them as kin – to be cared for and protected (2015, p.302).

In this performance, a group of human participants transmit a text from the shore to the sea, from “culture” to “nature.” The passage is from anthropologist Marcel Mauss’ book The Gift (2002), and is read aloud by the first participant who faces a group of people arrange between them and the shoreline.The other people taking part, on hearing the words spoken, turn around and speak the words again to the next row of participants, and so on, until the words are finally spoken into the waves – engaging the sea as a participant in the process. The ripple of spoken-word overlaps the incoming waves as they break on the shore; words get swept up on the wind, and mingle with the sound of the breaking waves.

This is a technique derived from the “human microphone” used to broadcast committee-proceedings at Occupy camps in 2011 (Brunner et al. 2013, p.12). At the camp in Toronto, when passing on the words that had been spoken, I felt an strong sense of taking part; far from being a passive conduit or transceiver in a relay, my decision to speak formed the group in that moment, and offered an invitation – a gift – to others to take part.

Mauss text accounts for the way that the Hau or “spirit of the gift” inhabits the process of exchange. In Maori culture, this spirit is shared among those who take part, as a ‘return on’ or ‘yield’ on exchange (Sahlins 1974).

This has been contrasted with the commodity in modern cultures. Marilyn Strathern suggests that the personification of things at work in the gift can be contrasted with the reification of people into things in Western forms of commodity exchange (1988, p.21). Strathern also notes that these ideas – of gift and commodity – are generated by aesthetic practices in each culture which give form to ideas. She asks anthropologists to consider how their own practices set these ‘constraints on form’ (1988, pp.180–1) – and ultimately how these constraints are transformed in their dealings with others (in Miyazaki 2010, p.261).

It’s in this spirit that the people that take part in The Gift begin to engage with things ordinarily outside of their own culture; offering a gift to the sea, open to a reciprocal, transformative exchange, in an attempt to cross the nature-culture divide.

REFERENCES

Brunner, C., Nigro, R. & Raunig, G., 2013. Post-Media Activism, Social Ecology and Eco-Art. Third Text, 27(1), pp.10–16.

Grear, A. & Kotzé, L.J., 2015. Research Handbook on Human Rights and the Environment, Edward Elgar Publishing.

Mauss, M., 2002. The Gift, Routledge.

Miyazaki, H., 2010. Gifts as Aesthetic Constraints. In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies. OUP Oxford, pp. 254–8.

Sahlins, M.D., 1974. The Spirit of the Gift. In Stone Age Economics. Transaction Publishers, pp. 149–167?

Strathern, M., 1988. The Gender of the Gift : Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia 1st ed., Berkeley: University of California Press