Anguilla Anguilla
Tuna Kuwharuwharu

Sueño con serpientes, con serpientes del mar,
…Largas, transparentes, en sus barrigas llevan
Lo que puedan arebatarle al amor.
Oh, oh, oh, la mató y aparese una mayor.
Oh, con mucho más infierno en digestión.

I dream of serpents, serpents of the sea,
…Long, transparent, in their bellies they carry
All that they can snatch away from love.
Oh, oh, oh, I kill one and a larger one appears.
Oh, with more hellfire burning inside!  [1]

The estuaries on the coasts of Aotearoa are the points at which endemic Tuna Kuwharuwharu, New Zealand Longfin eels, move between the inland bodies of water where they spend most of their lives, and the open ocean, where they travel to breeding grounds in deep tropical waters. Anguilla Anguilla, European eels, are known to spawn in the Sargasso Sea, but the exact process and location have never yet been observed. On entering the sea, the eels’ digestive systems become absorbed into their bodies, marking the beginning of a journey of thousands of miles, which they undertake just once at the end of their lives. After laying eggs, the mature eels die, their offspring hatching as tiny, shimmering, leaf-like larvae. These larvae float on oceanic currents back to estuaries on the coast, where they undergo a transformation, becoming translucent ‘glass’ eels. Conger eels, native to Europe and West Africa, may reach two metres or more in length. In some cases, they live more than a hundred years in inland, fresh-water bodies, before returning to their oceanic breeding grounds. Within an eel’s ear is a bone called an otolith, which accumulates annual rings, like a tree.

In a series of films made between 1980 and 1995, Jayne Parker worked with eels, fish and oysters, developing sequences in which poetic relationships are established between human bodies and those of the sea creatures she explores. Eels are phallic symbols[2] and have etymological and mythic relations with snakes and mermaids. They become disturbing protagonists in many of these films. In RX Recipe, 1980, an eel is stuffed and prepared, according to the prescription of a whispered recipe. The tender gestures of preparation are cut with the bandaging of a human leg, and as in many of Parker’s films, the forms of the female body and the eel become aligned. After being stuffed, the eel is bandaged and laid over a carpet - a kind of sacrificial figure - treated with care but ultimately destined for consumption.  The familiar and comforting quality of the recipe text becomes increasingly disorientating as the edge of violence present within the narrative - its associations of stifling domestic practice and routine, and the elisions of intimacy, care, labour and subordination, become more apparent.

Crystal Aquarium, made in 1995, further explores relations between eels, oysters, human subjects and underwater zones. The film centres around the actions of four protagonists – a swimmer, drummer, figure skater, and Parker herself, shown in a claustrophobic domestic setting. Each figure inhabits their arena - ice rink, pool, bedroom - alone. In the bedroom, Parker repeatedly sets fire to the sheets of the bed, sometimes lying next to the flaming mass; a partner which threatens to consume her.

The only words in the film come from the soundtrack, where Ella Fitzgerald’s fluid voice asks, “What is this thing called love?”, as Parker stands mutely watching a swarm of eels move fluidly together, seeming almost to caress her face through the walls of a tank. Their fluid, vulnerable and phallic forms move between entanglement and separation, thrumming into a coagulated mass and then dispersing. The eels, unlike the other protagonists, exist in intimate relation to each other, and the disturbing suggestion of their entwined existence stands in contrast to the isolated presence of the film’s female protagonists. They are held in close proximity by the tank, which echoes the enclosed domestic space that flickers and congeals as the fire, consuming the bed, gains momentum and strength. The qualities of ice, water and fire - translucency, fluidity, hostility - imbue the film with tensions and lyricism that establish slips between materials, objects, bodies, psychic and physical states.

Both RX Recipeand Crystal Aquarium establish figures - human, animal and architectural - that speak through a poetics that prioritises sensation, interiority, sexuality and desire. These sensual qualities imbue Parker’s subjects, both human and non-human, with liveliness, illuminating ways in which the imaginative currents that structure our intimate relations extend to our relations with the natural world.

The films raise questions about interplays of representation, agency and opacity in depictions of the more-than-human world. Do the sea creatures and geographical features - rivers, pools, shorelines - exist purely as sites for imaginative projection, or vehicles for narrative progression? Parker establishes mutable bodies that swim between human, material, animal identification, yet are clearly anchored to the presence of her human protagonists. The poetic alignments established render the non-human figures more than just signifiers of the dynamics of human subjective experience, suggesting identifications - corporeal and psychic - that imbue these creatures with power and agency. These attributes reveal the ways in which they are intimately related to and bound up with human desire, but also possess qualities, rhythms and voices that seem to impress themselves on the consciousness of the human subjects she represents.

Elizabeth Grosz’s theorisation of subjectivity in terms of the “primacy of corporeality”[3], unsettles distinctions between interiority as ‘depth’ and bodily experience as surface. She reframes bodies as centres of “perspective, insight, reflection, desire, agency”[4], using the image of the mobius strip to describe the complex interactions between the mind and body. Thinking beyond dualist models that separate consciousness from the physicality of the body (with the attendant gendered alignments of the female with the body, the male with the mind), the mobius suggests instead the manifold, and still little understood, interactions between the two. Images of folding and exchange, of distinct-but-one relation, may be useful to understand the entanglements of imaginative projection, desire and physicality, that structure our intimate relations and dependencies. If, as Donna Harraway suggests[5], our notions of kinship - the intimate ties that determine relations of self and other, responsibility, love and care within human societies - must be reimagined in order for us to make necessary shifts in our relations with the non-human world, Parker’s films illuminate a poetics of desire and identification, forms of “mutual indwelling”[6], that have the potential to reconfigure our relationship with the more-than-human world. 

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[1] Silvio Rodriguez, "Sueño con Serpientes", quoted in Anzaldua, G. (2012) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Fourth Edition. 4th ed. edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Pg 25.

[2] Parker, J. (2000) Jayne Parker: filmworks 79-00. Exeter: Spacex Gallery. Pg 14.

[3] Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pg viii

[4] Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pg viii

[5] Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble (Experimental Futures): Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Illustrated edition. Durham: Duke University Press Books.

[6] Parker, J. (2008) Jayne Parker. [videorecording]. London: BFI (British artists’ films).

Image Caption: Still from Jayne Parker, Crystal Aquarium, 1995