Common Ground: A Place to Stand – Together

Abstract

The immersive video installation, Common Ground, seeks to establish commonalities across racial boundaries based on cultural attitudes and grounded experience, including attachment to place, eviction from ancestral lands and enduring struggles for self-determination. Three stories (16:9) about connection to place, supported by massive ultra-widescreen 48:9 video landscapes, are told by Highland Scots (Gaels) from the very north of Scotland, ancestral homeland of the author, and three Māori from Te Tai Tokerau (Northland in Aotearoa New Zealand, current home of the author).

Writings by radical human ecologists describe as a triune the three-way relationship between land, people, and the unseen realms. The short stories that comprise Common Ground reveal a history riven when servants of capital intervened in the traditionally collective lives of people who had been cleaved to the land for millennia. The human ecologists call this enclosure as an ontological split. What affect does such a schism have on the psyche of the colonised… and, one wonders, on the colonisers and their offspring? As a settler living in an uncomfortably colonised reality, the author is drawn to Māori because their values are often ordered similarly. The way the stories are presented in Common Ground, is based on the Māori ritual of encounter within a meeting house (whare tupuna) where speakers take the floor un-interrupted and speeches are embellished by a song, be it a psalm, a waulking song, a Gaelic ballad or a prayer.

The immersive installation brings viewers together in a darkened space where they experience connection that may serve to remind them of the potential for the commons and commoning to be a salve for our grief.