Pacific Prison
An Easter Island odyssey for Montreal's veteran landworks artist
With the suitcase lying open, I was relieved to see only a helter-skelter of clothes and plastic bags. Who could tell what was what? Would the detectives recognize the rolls of exposed film?
Moments earlier, I had admitted to four or five heavy-set investigators that I had, indeed, laid out a ground configuration of volcanic stones to form a stylized octopus just to one side of a ceremonial area. Easter Island—known by the Polynesian natives as Rapa Nui, and by the Spanish-speaking Chileans as Isla de Pascua—has hundreds of these stone-rubble mounds along its coast. They were formerly platforms (ahu) supporting the massive ancestral stone statues, or moai, for which the island is well known. My work was a replication of a Heke petroglyph found on the north coast that pointedly referenced the meagre marine resources of the ancients of recent history.
The detectives had determined that archaeological damage had been done. CONAF (Corporación Nacional Forestal—the Chilean government's department of national parks and patrimonial trust) wanted the culprit. Somehow—maybe my hired assistant of three days, Genaro, had ratted on me—they got me at my guest house, just hours before I was to leave for the mainland the following morning.
A uniformed policeman then joined the others in my small room. Would he be the one to take me away? They asked to see the rolls I had shot. I obliged, realizing that objection and resistance would be my undoing. They muttered in Spanish that I was cooperating. I sensed they could have taken the other tack but for my eagerness to comply.
I wanted to cooperate—to be first into that suitcase. Navigating through their already extended hands, I rummaged through dirty laundry, receipts and cassettes of exposed and unused film. I quickly realized that they must not find the four small bags of dirt jumbled in with the other objects—earth and sand from two of the island's volcanic rims, Rano Raraku and Rano Kau, reddish flakes from the road near Ahu Vinapu and material gathered earlier at Valparaíso in Chile. This was site matter for an ongoing project called Soundings from the Water Planet. I have samples from about 175 spots to date from around the world, gathered since the early 1960s. I figured their discovery would leave me not just standing in shit but at the bottom of an ocean of it.
Fortunately, the dirt was double-bagged and easily moved out of sight as I revealed the 35-mm film they were after. The 36 rolls were placed on my bed and counted. This was followed by my signing documents allowing the police to take them away, along with my two cameras, as evidence. Later, because CONAF believed my images were made for financial gain and because my suspect photos would show to the outside world a non-touristic (hence skewed) view of the island, the police would publicly destroy the film. My sleight-of-hand rearrangment of the contents of my suitcase during the inspection and the detectives' unfamiliarity with film formats, however, had left me with 80 medium-format (6x7) colour slides.
These events took place on Wednesday, April 13, at about 8pm. The following morning at 9am, I was before the island's judge with a public defender, Oscar Mella, who spoke only Spanish. I missed my planned morning flight off the island when the prosecution petitions were extended to Friday to allow for more investigation. Bianca, my lawyer's Rapa Nui assistant, bravely supplied a broken translation of the Spanish legalese. I noticed that the only non-Chileans in the courtroom were Bianca, myself and a few spectators in the back.
Apparently, of the 200 to 300 stones used to make the octopus, Genaro Gatica and I had displaced two stones of archaeological significance, despite the steps I had taken to avoid this possibility: hiring a local who, I thought, had sufficient knowledge of his people's antiquities, and gathering what looked like only debris from 150 metres away. He mostly gathered; I placed.
On Friday, CONAF's prosecution lawyer, Oscar Vargas, presented written testimony from Genaro and photos of three other works (besides the octopus) on which he had assisted me. One of the three, Seven Directions, a pinwheel spread, contained a 20-centimetre-wide fragment of a toppled moai. As a consequence, the judge ordered my forced stay extended for another 22 days for further investigation and a third appearance before him the following Wednesday, April 20.
I had no defence against the charges. I was quite willing to go along with the prosecution—plead guilty, pay the fine, make amends—until I realized how far Chile would go. An example was to be made of me.
Normally I avoid obtaining official approval for my land configurations, as I have found it results in a great loss of time and energy. My decision to visit Easter Island was last-minute. I figured I could sidestep the bureaucracy and handle my interventions in a responsible way, hiring a local assistant as a fence against problems, curiosity and damage. In most of the many places I have visited, very little goes awry. In Egypt in 1984, I made a 33-part work entitled Osiris-Re-DisMembered, which involved installations next to the pyramids, temples along the Nile and Israeli military bunkers facing Lebanon. In January, 2001, I assembled five stone works along the trail that leads across the Theban Mountains into the Valley of the Kings. Although soldiers were billeted nearby, they did not venture out to stop me.
On Monday, April 18, I felt it was time to contact the Canadian Embassy in Santiago. The Consul there, Donald Boudreault, told me about a recent incident in Peru, where two Chilean teenagers had been thrown in prison after defacing a monument. One was still incarcerated at the time of our conversation. In Patagonia, a small fire started by a tourist had caused widespread damage. I found out too about other recent intrusions on Rapa Nui; tourists had carved graffiti into moai and tried to topple them.
My hesitation in contacting the Canadian Embassy was due to my belief that I could resolve the situation alone. I also wondered if my government would help or be as maladroit as it had been with Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen recently and notoriously incarcerated in Syria for more than a year. I remain thankful for the help my government provided once in Iran, in 1995, when I was spouting lifeblood from both ends due to a hemorrhaging duodenal ulcer. I needed an emergency operation at the University of Tehran hospital and ten pints of Iranian blood to offset the shakes brought on by shock. In the end, this time, they may have worked out something behind the scenes in Santiago. I don't know.
By Tuesday, April 19, dealings between my lawyer and CONAF saw a $700 (U.S.) fine rise to $5000. I was becoming increasingly concerned about the continuing delay—I had obligations at home, foremost to my frail wife and a brother in a long-term care facility. Finally, a deal was struck. In addition to the $5000 fine, it meant being banned from Easter Island for two years and writing four letters of apology to heads of various government departments—plus the destruction of the 36 confiscated rolls of film. But one of the Chilean government lawyers did not want the deal. He petitioned for my imprisonment and further investigation. Perhaps his demands were for the sake of appearances, but until the judge quashed his motion, I sweated.
My thoughts swirled around the 36 rolls of exposed film. I was greatly surprised that the authorities had not developed them. If they had, they would have seen another seven works they had not discovered. I had to be sure all the film was destroyed. The prosecution lawyer offered that the film could be developed and that I could retrieve the non-offending negatives. I replied that it would take too much time and kill the balance of my trip, which was in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. As I left the judicial offices, laughing policemen were stringing out the rolls like flypaper before a table set up for the press. They were making like Hollywood. My lawyer hurried me away.
A number of Rapa Nui showed sympathy and offered support. The mayor of the village said the incident would be good for tourism. I heard that the former governor of the island, who headed the local museum, felt my placements were like children's games and testified to this on my behalf. (Long live the child in us!) People wanted their photo taken with me—an archaeologist, my lawyer, even the police investigators.
While it was never said out loud, I had a feeling that I had tapped into a wide-ranging resentment against the mainland Chilean authority. The Rapa Nui—a Polynesian people—had not been consulted when their island was made a national park. They are still estranged from their property rights and possess little beyond their village's limits. Some want self-government and a say in land use. Perhaps I was seen as someone who (unknowingly) challenged things, who dared to introduce a kind of art that wasn't tourist merchandise.
Paradox and irony. Twins born from a shrinking planet and the subsequent rise of authority. Who has the right to property and thought? My landworks deal with nature, history and culture, serving as signs of the importance of these concepts and pointing to the need to preserve what we can for ourselves and the future. Yet they sometimes seem to be unwelcome guests in a planet overcome by professionals and experts who lack the ability to discern the many greys in our visual and thought processes. Despite the intent of my works to be transient, invisible and spare, they often intrude on official space.
Dammed if you do and damned if you don't.
Fall 2005
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