Post-extinction huia soundings, Te Whanganui-a-Tara 1912-1924
(moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet death)
McIntyre’s media-archaeological research explores 19th and early 20th Century Western musical notations of the song of the extinct huia, a culturally significant bird from Aotearoa. McIntyre’s work re-presents the notated scores, played on piano and transferred to the phonograph. The phonograph was the earliest sound reproduction mechanism created, and the only one that existed before the huia’s extinction.
These recorded sounds are played back across a series of sites where huia were documented in the Wellington Te Whanganui-a-Tara region, after the species’ official extinction date of 1907. The work proposes the huia’s call as echo chamber: a copy of a copy of archival memory. Songs without a bird. It also gestures to the ongoing, living presence of ecological memory within whenua that contains longer histories of more-than-human sonic interconnections between huia and humans in Aotearoa.
Join us at the opening event for Post-extinction huia soundings on Sat 4 July 2pm – 4pm.
Sally Ann McIntyre will be activating the fascinating wax cylinders that are featured in her exhibition. Be sure to come along to witness this haunting live performance of 19th century audio. Free to attend, all welcome click here for more details
About the artist
Sally Ann McIntyre is a Melbourne/Naarm based radio/transmission & sound artist, writer, researcher and educator from lutruwita/Tasmania & Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work draws on media archaeological and transmission art methods in combination with field recording to focus on environmental change and crisis, and provide a critique of the extractive histories of collecting. Her research and investigations into the sound & silence of birds in historic accounts of species extinction moves between the museum collection and the field, connecting threads within the economic, social and cultural relations of colonial Aotearoa New Zealand, constructing a poetic economy of loss that engages with scalar modes and the politics and poetics of listening.
Recent projects focus on the unrecorded voices of birds driven to extinction within settler-Colonial encounter, revisiting the Natural History museum’s strata of ‘dead silences’ to invite these ghostly sound marks back into particular physical sites and/or shared more-than-human cultural experience, with an emphasis on environmental witnessing, affective listening, cross-species mimicry, liminal silences, and the poetics of failure within mediated representation. As operator of the micro-transmission station radio cegeste, she has worked artistically with small-scale radio transmission since 2006.
Image credit: Sally Ann McIntyre, Post-extinction huia soundings, Te Whanganui-a-Tara 1912-1924 2023. Film still by Campbell Walker
For more information click here
