I am a salt lake

Ana Iti's film brings together footage from Kāpara-Te-Hau (the salt lakes in Te Tau Ihu), abstracted diagrams drawn on glass, and a first-person text. These three elements recur, something like the pattern-based process of learning where you repeat a sentence or bar of music until it is embodied, becomes part of you.

The work is grounded in Kāpara-Te-Hau, a specific geographical site and system: the climate, conditions, and industrial processes that produce salt. Kāpara-Te-Hau is near where the artist grew up in Te Waiharakeke Blenheim. The physical environment there is harsh—a wide shallow basin with no tributaries, limited rainfall, and hot dry winds, all of which make it ideal for salt production. Salt production has been operating in the region since 1952, and currently accounts for about half of all the salt used in Aotearoa.

Iti's work suggests that processes of sedimentation, documentation, and remembering are both ecological and social. Histories may be understood as residual within the landscape, leaving their own layers of sediment. I am a salt lake recognises the salt as one such layer or record.