Bird-man and ultrasound sharks tell of Galapagos damage

Catherine de Lange, contributor

(image: Paulo Catrica, 2010)

I lie perfectly still, listening to the sound of a hammerhead shark circling overhead. I hear another approaching, and another, until they are all around, arcing through the depths of the ocean . A deep rumbling begins then: the sound of a diving boat right above me. The platform I am lying on starts to vibrate and all the eerie sounds of the ocean crescendo around me.

The experience is at once meditative and claustrophobic, and I decide I?ve had enough. I get up, put my shoes back on, and continue round the new Galapagos exhibition at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool, UK.

The seed was sown for this exhibition when a group of European artists took part in a residency programme on the Galapagos Islands, in the Pacific, about a thousand kilometres off the coast of Equador. The residency was set up by the Galapagos Conservation Trust and each artist did a stint there at some point between 2007 and 2011.

Despite this shared location, this fascinating exhibition is incredibly diverse, in part due to the fact the artists chose to experience very different things there. Sound artist Kaffe Matthews, for example, spent time with research scientists on the islands who were tracking hammerhead sharks. After diving with the sharks and filming them, she took the data from the trackers and converted it through a digital oscillator into the eerie, ultrasound-like sounds I experienced while lying on a raised platform in her immersive exhibit.

Other artists, like Paulo Catrica stayed away from the scientists, and the national parks and the wildlife for which the Galapagos Islands have become famed, and instead spent his time with local residents, many of whom have moved there to service the burgeoning tourist industry or for scientific study. The result is a series of striking photographs of the urban developments that have sprung up in the three per cent of the island that is not preserved for nature. His anthropocentric works speak volumes about the perils faced by the islands? ecosystem and the people that rely on it..

The wealth of documentaries about the wildlife in the Galapagos Islands promulgate its reputation as an island paradise. But the majority of the exhibits here are deeply concerned with the environmental devastation on the islands. ?It?s not a glorified coffee table exhibition,? says Bergit Arends from London?s Natural History Museum and one of the curators of the exhibition. ?People seem to assume nobody lives there and that it?s paradise on earth, but it?s not true.?

In fact, there are 30,000 inhabitants on the Galapagos Islands now, joined each year by no less than 200,000 tourists. Any supplies or visitors arriving by plane or boat to this remote outpost can? bring along with them unwelcome stowaways in the form of invasive species.

It is the vulnerability of the islands that has captured the imaginations of most of the artists. The most successful of these turn their gaze from the celebrities of the Galapagos Islands - those incredible creatures such as the giant tortoises, the blue-footed boobies and the iguanas - to the people who live with them.

Jeremy Deller for example, shied away from documenting curious animals and instead made a film about cock fighting, a practice which has since been banned on the islands. His film says more about the people who watch and run these events than the battles themselves. In so doing, he puts animals and humans back on a level playing field.

In a humorous and thought-provoking work, Marcus Coates filmed a news report from the point of view of the endemic blue-footed booby. Dressed in a disguise he made himself out of what seem to be cardboard boxes, Coates explores the island interviewing inhabitants about their strange way of life. ?Are you categorised by your plumage?? ponders the bird.
?Some of you have more territory than others, why is that? Is it because some of you are bigger than others??. Eventually, he pityingly concludes humans aren?t that interesting - after all, tourists flock from around the world to see the boobies, but nobody comes to see the people.

(Image: Marcus Coates/Elke Hartmann)

Other artists carried the questions back from the Galapagos Islands with them, applying them to nature at home. Many of the animals we see on display are not from the Galapagos Islands at all, like the massive skeleton of a whale which plunges from the ceiling at the entrance to the gallery - a creature which artist Dorothy Cross found washed up on a beach in her home country, Ireland.

If these issues are equally pervasive in the artists home countries then, why not just stay at home? Indeed, the irony of the conservation trust sending a bunch more tourists along to the islands has not been lost. Cross?s work reflects the fact she spent much of her time there preoccupied with her own presence on the island. Should the artists have gone? She seems to conclude, probably not.

If all the artists had been so introspective, Cross may have been right. Thankfully, though, while Cross?s work asks an important question, her peers have also answered it, with a body of work so surprising and engaging that is hard not to judge their visit worthwhile.

Galapagos opens today at the Bluecoat in Liverpool, UK, and will run until 1 July. It will show again at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in November and Centro de Arte Moderna in Lisbon in April, 2013.
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