Stephen Turner (1) | danemitchell

Mounting extinction: unknown affinities

By Stephen Turner

Dane Mitchell’s Unknown Affinities suggests “mount” in two senses. Firstly, the exhibition stages extinction through a range of sculpture mounts that indicate the bio-dynamical structure of extinct birds. And, of course, extinction today is amplified by the climatological emergency of the Anthropocene. In this sense, extinction is mounting. Secondly, extinction itself is “mounted” through steel frames that would support once existent but now disappeared birds. But what is the relation between mounting in the sense of heaping up, and mounting in the sense of staging? Unknown Affinities grasps the holding or clasping infrastructure of the museum. Its presentational mounts, types and forms have themselves multiplied like an inorganic species, and have left modern remains.

Unknown Affinities tells us that we are never alone in the room of the museum. And that is because the apparatus of the museum itself is present in the room along with us. Whatever I see, think or feel — even the way that I behave — is the result of my sense of the museum’s presence in any room of its artefacts. So it is not just that the “object” of my encounter has already been pre-staged by the museum, but that I myself am equally shaped and formed by the room. Never mind the bird: I am filled in, or in-formed, by the museum before I encounter anything within it. To understand the built pedagogy of the museum as the determining agent of my experience, I need to think of its materials as taxonomical skeletons — categories, frames, boxes and lines. In the absence of actual birds whose mounts the museum would support, I am ghosted by an encounter with the museum itself.

The museum is the mass aggregate of its presentational mounts — the Mount of mounts if you like — an ever-expanding apparatus of the knowledge of everything. In principle it has no limit. The coloniality of the imperial, universalising, totalising, ever-expansive museum is obvious. On another view, which is that of less knowable affinities, the museum is a honeycomb of absence and presence, the tangible and intangible, noise and silence (it is no place for shouting, singing, dancing and the like). The museum is a web of holes, which are all the absences that its knowledge machinery has punched in the living world, snuffing out what it is then filled with. Extinct birds are both emblems and place-holders of absence. More specifically, the mount embodies the living bird and holds it at bay: the museum’s holding also withholds. The museum is a story of modernity, removal and re-placement, hence disappearance. Mitchell’s “birds” appear only in the museological shape of their disappearance. And that is because their shaping as such has contributed to their extinction. Put simply, we have been informed about extinction in advance of the fact.

Museological murmurs

Unknown Affinities addresses the museum’s grasping of once-living beings as “artefacts.”[1] Mitchell’s mounts materialise the technology of the museum’s holding, or scaffolding, what it is that literally “holds” and presents anything as an artefact, more largely the exoskeleton of the museum itself. As Roland Barthes says about the photograph, “a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see” (1981, 4). The negative space of holotypes, and mounts that indicate the specifications of extinct birds, ensure that it is the museum that we see, and certainly not the bird, which can only be (re)imagined. As an aggregate of mounts, the museum is an evolving apparatus that prehensively in-forms, or fills in, our experience of what it contains. What we see and feel is already grasped. The “bird” only appears as its holotype in the prehensive form of its technified framing. The museum’s “fourth wall” is a set of classificatory values that mark its limits.

Mounts do not stop with the monolith of the museum, which itself concretises the in-forming, shaping and developing disciplines of natural science, history and the arts. Despite its solid appearance, and universalising standpoint established by observation, collection and curation, the museum is a set of evolving protocols and practices, entangled in local life-worlds, and actually a diaspora of forms, or forms that in-form

While Mitchell’s frameworks suggest the skeletons of the large and looming extinct species that museums typically exhibit, it is the museum itself — its collecting, classifying, curating and storing technologies — that appears to be the dinosaur on, or rather as, the mount. The mounts of Unknown Affinities are fossils of the museological storehouse of modernity, along with its close cousins, the art gallery, archive, herbarium and zoo. The museum is a neolithic, enclosed, self-standing book of “life.” Its solidity is constituted by what it has extracted from the multiple ecologies of the world’s peoples and places. What appears in it has disappeared elsewhere. On another view it is a hole punch, hence the honeycomb of the bases of Mitchell’s mounts. Modernity, it turns out, is porous.

Emerging from the honeycomb bases, the steel frames of the holotypes appear anything but natural, while the technology and genealogy of classification is assuredly not the whakapapa of Te Ao Māori, within which all non-humans and humans are interrelated, understood and addressed.[2] According to Te Ara: The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, the extinction of very numerous bird species in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand (moa, goose, adzebill, duck, rail, wren, piopio and huia) works in parallel with that of frog species and reptiles (skink, gecko, species of tuatara), insects (species of weta), a bat, a freshwater fish (grayling or upokororo) and many plants (Holdaway 2007). Te Ara calculates that in 750 years of human history the vertebrate population of the country has been halved, with “uncounted losses” amongst invertebrates, whose remains are less durable. The extinction of bird species stands out on islands almost entirely free of predatory mammals, except for the Pacific dog (kurī) and rat (kiore), which uncomfortably criss-cross the living knowledge domain of mātauranga Māori and the nation’s wishful, wistful “predator-free” strategy.[3] The occasionally overdetermined language of bird extinction in Te Ara, such as a “moa butchery site” (Holdaway 2007, 3), betrays the displacement of settler colonial violence.

The steel frames of the mounts do not end with the museum. What grasps, clasps and encages extends to the technology of the whole country’s “mounting,” which is at once scientific (Captain James Cook’s maps), economic (city and farm surveys) and aesthetic (painting, photography and tourist guides). The “new” country is drawn up in multiple interconnected ways. So extinction has multiple sources, but none greater than land clearance and destruction of habitat − the primary instruments of disappearance − along with introduced species, hunting and collection. The imagined nation is mounted by the industrial instruments of its clearance and cultivation, from the electric tractor to the herringbone milking shed.

However noisy this process of mechanical colonisation, Mitchell’s mounts appear deathly silent, austere and airless. But perhaps what fills the lacunae of negative space is the absent birds’ cacophony, often remarked upon by early European visitors to Aotearoa, and, along with birdsong, the busy, rustling movement and sounds of reptiles and insects — the fullness of Te Ao Māori. The mounts are also insect-like and spidery, lifelike creatures standing on and stalking the white material base. Or else they are alien forms who replicate the process of the birds’ alienation through their unlikely and inhuman re-appearance. In this way the museum’s holdings bespeak the incessant murmuring of what has disappeared into it. Absence bespeaks presence, which is no actual creature but only what you imagine you might see, hear and feel.

Diaspora of forms

The lines of lacunae traced by Mitchell’s mounts suggest drawings in the air, a rigorously gestural aesthetics. And, indeed, the colonial history of “mounting” follows the drawing up of animals and plant species in taxonomical form. In this regard, the “school of drawing” and aesthetic programme initiated by Jos. Celestino Mutis in the Bogot. of “New Granada” in the late 18th century, following the establishment of a Royal Expedition (1783—1816) under King Charles III of Spain, exemplifies the entwined imperatives of enlightenment science, imperial control of peoples and places, enslavement and extraction of resources. Plants, wood and minerals are removed from a local environment and reappear, subsumed according to Linnaean classification, in the botanical houses of Europe (in Mutis’s case, the Real Jard.n Bot.nico de Madrid). Both the herbal (book of plants) and the herbarium are a product of the transport of plants, making the old world a storehouse of “new world” life. The holotypes of species and plants in museum settings can also be considered a diaspora of forms.

Typologies fill in, or in-form, emptying out non-human entities, and shredding their ecologies, while the Linnaean system of natural forms itself globalises, and incorporates newly “discovered” flora and fauna. The scientists of New Granada were as interested in the properties or attributes of new forms as in their shapes. Mutis took a particular interest in the flowering plant cinchona[4] as an imagined panacea for European diseases, yet disease and destruction for local peoples followed upon the arrival of these same Europeans and their practices of observation and documentation.

In the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, Cook’s Admiralty instructions were accompanied by the “hints” of the President of the Royal Society, James Douglas, 14th Earl of Morton, which suggested that he seek “a Continent in the Lower temperate Latitudes and if successful, be vigilant to note any valuable resources in the form of agricultural possibilities or minerals that might be evident” (National Library of Australia n.d.). The hints further instructed Cook to detail plant life, including how specimens might be mounted, and what medicinal properties they might have. Enlightenment and colonisation suggest a twinned enterprise, and a darkening for local people and their embodied knowledge domain.[5] On board, collecting, drawing and sketching proceeded apace to convert the place into an object of “new” knowledge and prospect for would-be settlers, adventurers and tourists. Gentleman naturalist and future President of the Royal Society, Joseph Banks, was no less a dedicated collector and devotee of Linnaeus.[6] His own closely guarded and carefully cultivated library would later prove a significant addition to the British Museum, which opened in 1759. He was joined by the under-studied illustrator Sydney Parkinson, the Linnaean “apostle” Daniel Solander, who was instrumental in the development of the British Museum’s systematic classification and organisation of flora and fauna, and his assistant botanist Herman Spring. Solander is also responsible for the “Solander box,” a miniature museum piece, or museum in miniature, for storing manuscripts, maps, prints and drawings.

After the “wunderkammer” and “cabinet of curiosities” of earlier encyclopaedic and aristocratic collectors, “enlightenment” was defined by a new taxonomical means for grasping the natural world. Types of natural forms extended from science to arts, through the etching, engraving and painting of the drawings of William Hodges and John Webber on Cook’s later voyages. Many technologies and techniques made up Cook’s modern ark, and enabled local places and peoples to be held in view, including British landscape aesthetics — the beautiful, the picturesque and the sublime.[7] Their socioeconomic progeny was the proto-dominion of wasteland, land that was neither scenic nor seemingly used and therefore appropriable.

A display of mounts not only empties the museum of its contents by reducing them to prehensive forms, but provides a physical sketch of absences, which Mitchell has imagined as The Museum of Without: a holding of holotypes, armatures, cabinets and cases. The entanglement of the globalising museum apparatus in new-world contexts such as Aotearoa New Zealand is intimately bound up with local disappearance and extinction of species through visual and artefactual subsumption. Te Ara does not have an entry on encyclopaedias, but does mention its own nation-based and nation-making antecedents. Under the heading “Precursors,” in the story of its own origins, Te Ara notes that “the New Zealand government first became involved in the preparation of [such] reference works for the 1940 centennial” (Te Ara Team n.d., 1). The county is a product of its exhibition, curation and annotation, which includes an accompanying loss of bird species: “Although often severely depleted [before actual extinction] they appeared in European drawings, written records and museum collections” (Holdaway 2007, 4). The technology of drawing, collecting, curation and display has agency, too, enfolded within and articulating the multiple agencies of settler colonialism.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s world-leading loss of biodiversity[8] in the foreshortened timespan of 200 years makes it hyper-modern. It is not that “we have never been modern,” as Bruno Latour titles his critique of the nature-culture divide (2007), so that its “nature” is a purified object of culture, but that “New Zealand” for much of its short history has been all too modern. Latour a-colonially makes no distinction between “old” countries and “new,” and does not see the making of the former as a refraction of the latter. Drawing on Paul Virilio’s accidentology (2007), which proposes that invention presages new accidents, the sketch or mount presupposes the absence, and possible extinction, of what it holds. What is “presented” by the mount is at the same time, and by the technology of its framing, also withdrawn. With regard to the great shadow cast over local people and places by the modern episteme, the relation between the movement of peoples and specimens and the “accident” of their propulsion is made explicit by the naming of cars after birds: the cult Nissan Bluebird or Ford Falcon suggest the deathly enfolding of inorganic and natural ecologies. In Unknown Affinities you can hear the birdcalls of Mitchell’s otherwise silent mounts on the FM station in your car, icon of the nation-on-the-go.[9] Here “transmission” also refers to a car’s gearbox, the engineering of extinction, and gearing of national modernisation. The car, and the infrastructure of its function, synthesises modern murmuring.

Para-sight

Mitchell’s mounts present the extinct bird in the form of para-sight, a double-seeing of a bird that appears utterly beside itself. However flightless, it has flown. The material assemblage of the holotype both re-places and displaces the bird by drawing our attention to its absence. “Para” means beside, while para-sight identifies the separation of an animal, bird, insect or plant from its ecology, and the splitting apart achieved by its taxonomy, or taxidermy, through its relocation in the museological, archival or zoological setting. The museum, zoo and even wildlife park can be considered exemplary sites of para-sight, by contrast with the bird’s “natural” habitat, which emerges as such through the staged enclosure. The museum’s modernity is part of the production of nature, or rather colonial nostalgia, given that nature as the site of removal is something settlers wish to return to.

That Aotearoa New Zealand remains beside itself is evident in Zealandia, the utopian-sounding bird sanctuary in Karori, Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, whose predator-defying fence both frames and re-mounts “New Zealand.”[10] Here, the country is hardly returned to what “it” was, the “before” of settler time, but emerges as the obverse of its makeover. Building in builds out the past of predation, constructing a new memory of place, yet birds, if not predators, will not be contained.[11] In its reconstruction, segregation and even technical simulation of “natural ecology,” including listening posts for birdcalls and an artificial lake at its centre, Zealandia “functions much like a museum” (Poeschl, 2020, 201). As an antecedent, the birdcalls that radio announcer Robert Taylor introduced on his early-morning show in the 1970s (Nathan 2007) became a popular national “listening post.” In Unknown Affinities the “listening post” of technified nature extends from Zealandia to FM radio and the hybrid car-bird.

The para-sight of the new country and the museum of the old country are entwined by the flight of specimens. Referring to contemporary photogrammetry, which challenges the museum’s ownership of artefacts, and the very idea of property, through digital reproduction and circulation (Elias 2019), Mitchell reflects on modern movement in a way that unites the migration of forms and birds:

Parthenon Marbles replicas and Brancusi dummies remind us that objects, including those unrepatriated spoils stored in the vaults of museums, are in constant movement — that all things are migratory and transitory — be that ideologically, through the reappraisal of contested histories, or materially, through the initial movement of objects away from and, perhaps now more than ever, back to their points of origin. (Mitchell 2022)[12]

Mitchell’s mounts literally re-stage removal and re-placement and draw attention to the museum as stage. It is not that “all the world’s a stage,” but that all the world in a colonial context is a museum. The relation between collection and extinction is determined by the very modernity of the museum, whose entwined scientific, economic and aesthetic aspects constitute the colonial apparatus of the world’s “discovery.” The consequent makeover by discovery of already known species and plants is the basis of the new country and the material of the museum of the old, while modern epistemology as its ideology-in-practice determines disappearance. In the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, this epistemology as taxonomy is well described by the book of “Buller’s birds.”

In the course of his ornithological studies and production of his classic text, History of the Birds of New Zealand (1872–73), with drawings by Dutch illustrator J. G. Keulemans, 19th-century gentleman-naturalist Walter Buller was not alone in thinking that the birds and other species he observed, collected and wrote about were dying out due to the importation and competition of more “vigorous” species (Galbreath 1990): “Buller’s work was viewed by many of his contemporaries as a record of the country’s native birds before they inevitably died out” (New Zealand History Ngā Kōrero a Ipurangi o Aotearoa n.d.). What Unknown Affinities tells us was plainly not news to Buller’s contemporaries. This is what they saw, and expected, if today we wish it were not so. Where settlers imagined they were making a utopian society, if not paradise, in the form of a better Britain, the reference to biodiversity loss in Simon Nathan’s history of conservation is called “Paradise lost.”[13]

Buller himself — collector, curator, lawyer for the Native Land Court and aspiring but unsuccessful politician, as well as the first New Zealand-born recipient of a knighthood — was a most vigorous man (the 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand remarks on his “characteristic energy and foresight”). His classic text is based on an essay that he originally wrote for the New Zealand Exhibition in Dunedin in 1865. The relation between Buller’s text and extinction was made concrete by the para-sight of the exhibition, which explicitly staged New Zealand “beside” itself. The new country emerged in and through its exhibition, staging or “mounting” (as far as modernity is concerned, the whole world is a “new” country). So the emerging nation of New Zealand came into view as an exhibit of itself, as if it had always been coming to be its mount. Its destiny was manifest in the much larger and most modern Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1876 in London, for which Buller was the New Zealand Commissioner. The Māori Court presented waxwork figures of a traditionally dressed rangatira, a woman standing beside a pātaka, and another gathering food, suggesting in frozen form their presumed disappearance, considered the predicate of the new country’s emergence. Buller’s social aspiration is inseparable from his social Darwinism. Mounts mount. His classic text of collected birds is itself a collector’s item.

With regard to Buller’s personal collecting of rare bird specimens, the 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand notes “the wholesale destruction of his own rapacity and that [which] other collectors had engendered.” Perhaps there is no more exact rendition of the relation between collecting and extinction — where the record or documenting of a bird also relates, if not actually contributes, to its extinction — than Holdaway’s account in Te Ara of the last remaining South Island merganser, one of six extinct duck species, which was shot in 1902 for the private collection of Governor Lord Ranfurly (Holdaway 2007, 5). Thus collection trumped preservation, and hastened extinction. Te Ara also notes that the only existing specimen of an extinct reptile, the world’s largest gecko, the kawakaweau, last reported in 1870, is held in a French museum (Holdaway 2007). Significant in Māori kōrero, its point of origin today also calls it back. But from the collector’s point of view, if such species were anyway already headed for extinction, personally removing more of them for the record would not affect the destiny of their disappearance.

Birds alive

Birds and other species have not only been helped towards extinction by their collection and exhibition, but by popular nostalgia for primordial New Zealand. The wound of extinction, and loss of biodiversity, is occluded by the restorative nostalgia of nature — again, produced by removal and replacement — and the wash of settler colonial jouissance. This affect can be felt in the “huia” scene of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most popular and perhaps best-loved film, Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016). The unlikely couple and rebel heroes Ricky (Julian Dennison) and Uncle Hec (Sam Neill) are in the bush, before being chased down by the police and the rabid social-services worker Paula (Rachel House), when they encounter the extinct huia, actually last sighted in 1907.

The bird’s disappearance, and the loss of its distinctive voice,[14] is most keenly felt by tangata whenua − its highly valued feathers attributed mana[15] — while “last sightings” is a poignant theme in Aotearoa New Zealand’s natural history. Whether Ricky and Hec in Wilderpeople really see it or not, of course a technical animation of film, it is pretty to think so.[16] What the film asks us to swallow is that the museum might have swallowed itself, so that the removal and disappearance of the huia, amongst many species, did not after all happen. If the mounts of museological knowledge have made modernity irremediable, the “museum of without” suggests a different holding of the past. Without bringing anything back to life, Mitchell‘s murmuring mounts contribute to the museum’s undoing, or unlearning.

Bibliography

An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand. 1966. s.v. “Buller, Sir Walter Lawry, N.Z.C., K.C.M.G., F.R.S.” https://teara.govt.nz/en/1966/buller-sir-walter-lawry-nzc-kcmg-frs Barclay, Barry. 2005. “Before the Beginning.” In Mana Tuturu: Maori Treasures and Intellectual Property Rights, 5–32. Auckland University Press.

Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.

Boswell, Anna. 2017. “Settler Sanctuaries and the Stoat-Free State.” Animal Studies Journal 6 (2): 109—136. https://ro.uow.edu.au/asj/vol6/iss2/7

Boswell, Anna. 2017. “Stowaway Memory.” Pacific Dynamics: Journal of Interdisciplinary Research 2 (2): 89–104.

Deliss, Clementine. 2020. The Metabolic Museum. Berlin and Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz.

Elias, Chad. 2019. “Whose Digital Heritage: Contemporary Art, 3D Printing and the Limits of Cultural Property.” Third Text 33 (6): 687—707. https://doi.org/10.1080/0952 8822.2019.1667629

Galbreath, Ross. 1990. “Buller, Walter Lawry.” Nga Tangata Taumata Rau Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Reproduced in Te Ara: The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand. https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1b46/buller-walter-lawry

Holdaway, Richard. 2007. “Extinctions.” Te Ara: The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand. https://teara.govt.nz/en/extinctions

Johnston, Sarah. 2020. “Te Karanga a te Huia. The Call of the Huia.” Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision, September 29, 2020. https://www.ngataonga.org.nz/blog/ nz-history/the-call-of-the-huia/

Latour, Bruno. 2012. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nathan, Simon. 2007. “Conservation — A History.” Te Ara: The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, updated August 1, 2015. https://teara.govt.nz/en/conservation-a-history

National Library of Australia. n.d. “Hints Offered to the Consideration of Captain Cook.” https://www.nla.gov.au/digital-classroom/senior-secondary/cook-andpacific/ indigenous-responses-cook-and-his-voyage/hints#

New Zealand History Ngā Kōrero a Ipurangi o Aotearoa. n.d. “Buller’s Birds.” Updated October 4, 2021. https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/bullers-birds

Park, Geoff. 2006. “Theatre Country.” In Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape &Whenua, 113—128. Wellington: Victoria University Press.

Poeschl, Lorenz G. F. 2020. De-naturalising Affects: Towards Intimacy as a Means to Negotiate Settler Public Pedagogies in the Aotearoa/New Zealand Nature Site. PhD thesis, University of Auckland.

Roberts, Mere. 2012. “Mind Maps of the Māori.” GeoJournal 77 (6): 741—751.

Rose, Edwin D. 2018. “Specimens, Slips and Systems: Daniel Solander and the Classification of Nature at the World’s First Public Museum, 1753—1768.” The British Journal for the History of Science 51 (2): 205—237.

Te Ara Team. n.d. “Te Ara — A History.” Te Ara: The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand. https://teara.govt.nz/en/te-ara-a-history/page-1

Te Punga Somerville, Alice. 2020. Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books.

Virilio, Paul. 2007. The Original Accident. Translated by Julie Rose. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity.

Waitangi Tribunal. 2011. WAI 262: Ko Aotearoa Tenei /This is Aotearoa. Wellington: New Zealand Government. https://www.wai262.nz/ko-aotearoa-tenei

[1]On the museum as an apparatus of removal and cold storage, and, with regard to its ethnographic collections, also remedial possibilities, see Clementine Deliss’s book The Metabolic Museum. Pushing against ethnographic expertise and framing, and the illegal “organ trade” of objects in the “necropolitical” colonial museum, the transformative “metabolic” post-ethnographic museum is one of living things rather than artefacts, with “respect and copyright” owed to their ancestors (119).

[2] In “Mind Maps of the Māori,” Mere Roberts provides detailed examples of the “folk-taxonomic function” (2012, 746) of whakapapa, which, unlike the linear, planar and diagrammatical abstractions of European maps, are cosmogonical, experiential and performative, and served “to record, organise, store and recall information about the new environment” (743) that Māori found in Aotearoa. Their retracing of descent lines, based in oceanic navigation and ancestral story (kōrero tuko iho), supersede and dissolve the circumscription of Cook’s map.

[3] In the light of settler colonial logics of “enclosure” and “deathworlding,” Anna Boswell (2017) examines the self-conflicted legacy of “sanctuary thinking” and “sanctuary-making” in terms of the settlement project’s one-time helpmate, the stoat, today one of the mustelids in the cross-hairs of the Aotearoa New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy (2000) and the New Zealand Government’s more recent Predator Free 2050 campaign (2016). Strictly speaking, wildlife sanctuaries remove both birds and settlers themselves, refigured as innocent “Kiwis,” from the destruction of settlement. For the kiore, see Boswell’s further 2017 essay “Stowaway Memory.”

[4] The cinchona foreshadows more contemporary interest in the psychedelic and healing properties of the Brazilian ayahuasca. For critical and historically informed commentary on the European interest in the properties of local plants, entangled with scientific exploration and colonial extractivism, see Ciro Guerra’s ficto-historical feature film Embrace of the Serpent (El abrazo de la serpiente) (2015), which follows the encounter with a local shaman of two different 20th-century European explorerscientists going down the Colombian Amazon in search of the fictive yakrani plant. Through the river’s teaching and its overriding power, they are opened to the Amazon by having to relinquish their scientific equipment and epistemic authority.

[5] On the depredations and lingering exactions of Cook and his crew, see Alice Te Punga Somerville’s book Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook.

[6] According to the classificatory binomial system of Carl Linnaeus, referring to the generic and specific name of the specimen, the natural world was newly ordered by kingdom, class, order, genera and species. Indexical manuscript “slips” founded the flexible paper technologies of modern information management, making the museum a book of life (Rose 2018).

[7] For a rich account of these categories in the Aotearoa New Zealand context, see Geoff Park’s chapter “Theatre Country” in his book Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape & Whenua. The “picturesque scene” of the new country was produced in condensed and pre-framed form by the early artist’s Claude glass, seen on the book’s cover, which was “a darkly tinted, convex pocket mirror” (116) that required its holder to turn their back on what lay before them in order to enjoy the prospect.

[8] Citing the report by the Ministry for the Environment, The State of New Zealand’s Environment (1997), Simon Nathan says that Aotearoa New Zealand has lost 85 percent of lowland forest and wetlands, while 800 species and 200 subspecies of animals, fungi and plants remain threatened (2007, 10).

[9] From email correspondence with Dane Mitchell, this is an as yet unrealised element of this body of work.

[10] In his book chapter “Before the Beginning,” Barry Barclay (2005) takes issue with settler beginnings, and the lawless appearance of Cook and his crew in Aotearoa. That “before” also stands in front of and before the settler today, face to face (kanohi ki te kanohi), as the future of Aotearoa New Zealand.

[11] Lorenz Poeschl (2020) observes the South Island takahē in North Island sanctuaries such as Tiritiri Matangi, the removal from the same reserve of the predatory weka to protect the young of other species, and young kākā that cross the boundaries of Zealandia, frustrating the desire of staff to more intensely cluster their presence.

[12] This text will appear in articles in both Art News New Zealand and ArtAsiaPacific later in 2022.

[13] The entwined human and morethan- human ecology of longstanding mātauranga Māori offers a counterview of biodiversity. For the challenge to national governance posed by kaitiakitanga (guardianship) and whanaungatanga (kinship) as the prior and primary “first” law of tikanga, see the compendious report of the Waitangi Tribunal, WAI 262: Ko Aotearoa Tenei /This is Aotearoa.

[14] According to Sarah Johnston, on the Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision website, the most requested sound recording is that of the huia, which has been reconstructed by Hēnare Hāmana from his own living memory (Johnston 2020).

[15] For an expert discussion of museum collections and the entanglement of Indigenous and European histories, with particular attention to the overlooked social and cosmological implications of Polynesian feather headdresses, see Maia Nuku, “Caught in Entangled Frontiers,” https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=hpUtkei0 euo&list=PLQKojuq2mh0VtOM_ U6h7ycsIiKXFOAKpn&index=4

[16] The colonial jouissance revealed by popular enjoyment of this scene, and the nature–nostalgia nexus of latter-day settler ideology — counter-posed by overlapping and encompassing mātauranga Māori — is precisely the affective displacement of what was going to be by what might yet have been.