Looking Slowly: Starting from Place

Looking Slowly, Starting from Place explores Pacific scholar and activist Katerina Teaiwa’s work with archival photographs of Banaba, held within libraries and state institutions in Australia and Aotearoa / New Zealand. These photographs were taken during what would become eight-decades of phosphate mining across the 20th Century, which resulted in approximately 22 million tons of Banaban land being redistributed across Australia and New Zealand in the form of phosphate fertilisers. A joint Australian, New Zealand and British government mining company was responsible for the extensive mining that decimated the island of Banaba and displaced the entire Indigenous population. Through a method of looking slowly and animating the photographs in her mind, Katerina focuses on details and irregularities, filling the archival gaps with her own knowledge and imagination to uncover the story of what happened to Banabans and their home. In this film, she focuses on photographs of women, noticing the way they disappear from the archive earlier than Banaban men. Katerina connects this with oral histories to undercover the way women defended the land and led the Banaban resistance to colonial mining. The film performs its own version of looking slowly through the inclusion of intercut footage of the Pivot fertiliser factory in Geelong, which is one of the sites Banaban rock was turned into fertiliser and then distributed across Victoria.<p></p>