Video

Take My Shoes  version#1 . Raewyn Turner

Duration 13.10 mins

Woven into the text are words from the World News along with an imaginative account of early European settlement of NZ and grandmother's stories glimpsed through contemporary eyes. The settlers’ journey and subsequent description of the city skyline visualizes how the secret folds of the newly created city and environs contribute to the citizens concerns.  The settlers cut down the trees and expose bare hills which echo their words. 

I  am in this place and the new automated targeting system will pick up all the aliens and what they’ve had for in-flight meals. Even when I wear a one ounce

gold krugerrand

around my neck

I don't feel safe

my mobile in my hand

my credit card in my bra

the witness thought the gunman holding up the bank guards

was a training exercise he forced the guards to the ground

to the ground the same ground that held up the other people that have walked around New Zealand Bishop Sneddon, my grandmother Maria Angelica who

rode on a steamboat

seated at the point where the aft and the starboard met

arriving on her 17th birthday with her husband. A dowry farine

a goat capra

a grapevine iona

propelled by the 3rd wave of new settlers and a promise

to mother

upon her approach to the shores of her new life she heard the silvery sound of birdsong  

two sounds for every sound.

Maria Maria

            Angelica Angelica

as she was giving birth to her fifth child her mother appeared in a vision at the foot of her bed. Her mother’s death and her son’s birth were intertwined into the passage of entry and exit from the world. Entwined.

The city of sails was built by white settlers who sailed from a motherland and built houses made from the wood of local trees.

They cut down the trees and burnt the bush leaving bare hills

                                        bare hills

Every sound and movement of persons and goods is answered from the hills by a similar sound returned on a river of wave forms. the two sounds of life co-exist always travelling in opposite directions, across the sea of air

into dreams

every sound that is made in the new country is repeated in an echo that bounces back from bare hills. the deflected sound is heard sometimes three or four times in quick succession.

bare hills

               bare hills

the settlers know that each of their words will be echoed across the nation, caught sometimes in the net of media and pinned screaming from headlines in 

newspapers.

meanwhile naked folded hills take up the sounds turning them around tourniquet tightly

split into packets

little gifts of information.

At times the echoes increase a sound’s value, at times it seems that the echoes are more real than their sources ;  not everything that seems to be deeply meaningful, like poetry read out loud, singing, and the moans of lovers, maintains its force.

the residents are filled with emotions of Happiness Love Shame

Anger

warmed by the heat of concrete and ovens, computer terminals, water cisterns, swimming pools, air conditioning, bitumen roads, food factories

wishing for raindrops that fall singularly from rainbows

within them 360 degrees of purest objects

watched by seagulls on lamp posts.