The Founder’s Paradox uses gaming to reflect on competing political visions for New Zealand’s future. Berlin-based New Zealand artist Simon Denny uses the visual language of board games to reflect on new mythologies of the entrepreneurial founder as well as the changing role of the nation state in a time of political uncertainty. Denny’s sculptures, prints and paintings collapse together fantasy imagery with expansionist ambition – an uneasy polemic which has long had particular resonance in the South Island of New Zealand, which is increasingly being looked to as a bolt-hole for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. In an increasingly fractured and fractious world, the neoliberal status quo in New Zealand and further afield is beginning to be questioned at both ends of the political spectrum. Denny’s work reflects on competing political visions for New Zealand’s future within a volatile social climate destabilised by new technologies.
I would say this: Using the metaphor of board games such as Life, Magic and Catan, Denny delivers a damning criticism of modern society. For example, on the cover art of "Life" he shows one person in a mansion and the rest falling in a chasm. The detail and complexity was overwhelming, but always spot-on.
We went to a Mexican restaurant and had the most amazing feast. That evening we went to the cinema and saw, "Ralph Breaks the Internet" which I quite enjoyed, but the kids didn't. We got out of the cinema at 10pm to find the bus stopped running at 9:52pm! There were too many of us for a taxi, and two taxis was going to cost us $50. There was another bus which dropped us about 20 minutes from the house, so we waited for that. I told the driver where we were going and he told us to stay on the bus; it was his last shift and he'd take us home after. Only in New Zealand.
On January 2, the eldest was heading to Auckland so we dropped her at the airport in the morning and took the other two to the Christchurch gondola and then on to Lyttleton. I did not realise at the time that the earthquake that had flattened Christchurch in 2011 was actually centred on Lyttleton. It looked like a sleepy little port town, but in hindsight it was just still recovering.
We meant to take the ferry to Diamond Harbour but managed to miss it by literally one minute, and they were still operating on a holiday timetable so the next one wouldn't be for an hour. It was boiling hot and there was nothing to do, so I decided to drive all the way around the bays. The 8-minute ferry ride took 40 minutes by car, and we discovered that Diamond Harbour was just as boring as Lyttleton; the only difference was you could swim by the wharf. The youngest -- who would normally jump at the chance -- decided to take a nap in the car; I think he's having a bit of a growth spurt. The middle child is still a water baby, and happily leapt off the wharf repeatedly. (When I was growing up, most 16 year old girls only went to the beach to get tan, and would never consider going in the water.)
The only excitement that day was getting home: I had to return the car by 6pm or pay a late fee. It was 5pm and we were an hour away. Thankfully there was no traffic and I was able to drop the kids and stuff at the house and got the car back at 6pm on the dot. I also found someone had left a Lime scooter nearby, so I didn't have to walk 20 minutes back to the house. :-)
Thursday morning the kids went to the pool with my partner. I came over later, only to find what I thought was a boring regional pool was actually a major complex with three pools, several water slides, a volleyball court and more! In the afternoon we took an uber into town (since there were now only four of us) and visited Quake City, which tried to describe the earthquake and its aftermath. In the end, it was too massive, too big a scale for us to comprehend. I read a statistic that of the 140,000 houses, 45% were damaged and 10% -- 14,000 -- were demolished. Some were rebuilt; many were not.
In the afternoon, we did Blokarting. A pun on "gokarting," a blokart has no engine but uses a sail for power. I wasn't quite sure how it was going to go -- and my partner was trying to weasel out -- but it turned out to be a blast for everyone. When the wind was blowing, you could really get some speed, and when turning the cart often went up on two wheels and skidded in the gravel, which was brilliant fun. It took a few minutes to get the hang of it but the kids were naturals, and it was hard to pass them. Sadly, I'm a bit competitive and I cheated; hearing their howls of protest behind me was very gratifying. The middle child decided turnabout was fair play and she tried the same cheat, but being half as heavy as me her kart went up one two wheels and I was certain she was going to flip it. (Somehow she got it back down.)
More than that, the blokarting was inside the "red zone," the eastern suburbs hardest hit by the earthquake. Just wandering around, you could see gaps like missing teeth in some roads, but other roads were closed and it just looked like a meadow. The only sign that there had ever been houses there were the streets and power lines still running through.
Friday morning the other two were headed for Auckland, and they had to be at the airport at 5:30am. Yoogo was offering an overnight special (8pm-8am) so I booked it and in the evening I took the middle child out driving. (She just got her learner's permit.) That night she mastered turn signals and discovered she was driving an automatic. (For some reason she assumed it was a manual.) She also went on-road for the first time -- it was about 25 meters, it was 10pm, there wasn't a soul around and she was absolutely freaking out.
We all packed that night, because my partner and I were trading in the 3-bed house for a romantic hotel room in town. I say "romantic" but when I was working in Runcorn in the UK, I racked up so many points with Holiday Inn they gave me "platinum elite" status, which even four years later gets me free upgrades. So I booked the cheapest room at the Crowne Plaza and they gave us a lovely room on the 13th floor*.
We dredged ourselves up at some ungodly hour, somehow got to the airport at 5:30am, dropped the kids, came back to the house, my partner went to the pool and I took our luggage (which had grown expansively after the kids decided they didn't need certain things on camp) to the hotel. I got back, returned the car, met my partner at the pool, and we took the bus back into town. We went to the "cardboard cathedral" (officially the "transitional cathedral") which was built two years after the earthquake, while the city struggled to decide with what to do with the original cathedral that was so badly damaged in the quake. (Spoiler alert: They still haven't decided.) It claims to seat 700, and the walls are actually shipping containers and the roof is perspex (plexiglass). The original architect wanted to use cardboard tubes as a structural element to support the roof, but they couldn't find a local manufacturer who could make the cardboard strong enough, and the cost of shipping it from Germany was too high, so the cardboard tubes are now just artistic elements which hide the wooden beams. That said, it still has great proportions and is a very serene space.
The day was much cooler (22C/72F instead of 29C/84F) so we walked around town, through the botanics and the museum. For dinner, a friend recommended a Burmese restaurant which was quite nice.
Saturday it was 33C/91F so we decided to go to Hanmer Springs. We'd done no research and it probably wasn't the best thought-out plan: Hanmer Springs is famous for its natural hot pools, but who wants to sit in a hot pool on a hot day? But before we could do that, we had to go to synagogue.
The Canterbury Hebrew Congregation (who probably don't like having "Christchurch" as part of their name) was established in 1864. Never terribly large, they did have a beautiful building from 1864-1987, but they decided to demolish it and build a new one. The new one was damaged in the earthquake and closed for two years, but reopened in 2013. One of its features was a stone ark (where the Torah scrolls are located) but it smashed in the earthquake and still has not been rebuilt. (The congregation had to get special permission to enter the building after the earthquake to retrieve the scrolls.) They are officially "conservative" but some of the members consider themselves progressive, and so I wanted to meet some of these people. Because synagogues are universally wary of visitors, I contacted them several weeks ago to let them know I was coming. I got a response that it would probably be pretty light over the holidays, but I was welcome to come.
So I came, and I was standing outside the closed gates on Saturday at 10am wondering what was going on. We called the synagogue but there was no answer. I sent an email to the person who originally contacted me, but didn't hear back. My partner had the phone number of a parent whose daughter is also going to Israel, so we contacted her and she was out of town but told us there were no services today. Unbelievable!
So we got the car and drove to Hanmer Springs, arriving about 3pm. I don't know if there are natural pools or what; all I know is we followed the sat nav to a facility that had a dozen pools, each with its own "profile." The cashier explained that the water came up from a bore at 70-80C, and they used a heat exchanger to cool that water and heat up tap water, then they progressively filtered the water. Thus, some pools were 34C/94F and others were 40C/104F; some were netural mineral water, others were tap water. Some stank of sulphur, others of chlorine. And more importantly, some were chock full of kids, and others were adults only. We spent most of our time in the spa pool, which had the biggest jets I'd ever experienced. They installed a rail for you to hang on to; otherwise you'd just get pushed away!
We stayed until about 6pm, then drove back to Christchurch and had dinner at the Little High eatery. It seems like everything that was created for convenience or affordability has to be "reinvented" as a fancy version of itself. Little High describes itself as, "Christchurch's newest and most unique space to eat out. There's nothing else like this. Experience eight different local and family-run businesses inside our modern marketplace with plenty of shared seating." What it should say is "posh food court." Next thing you know, they'll be putting posh food trucks inside a posh food court! (That said, my partner said the pad thai was the best she ever had, and I had a delicious tempura vegetable bao bun.)
The evening, I had to stay up until midnight to change our flight home. When I booked it on Air New Zealand, I found a very strange option called "flexitime." Basically, on the day of the flight you could change it to any available flight that day at no cost. The Sunday flight at 7:35am with "flexitime" was much cheaper than the Sunday 4pm flight, so I booked that. Obviously I didn't want to fly home at 7:35am, so at midnight I logged onto the Air New Zealand website and moved my reservation to the 4pm flight. Job done, and I saved myself $200. :-)
So now we had most of Sunday to play with, and we knew exactly what we wanted to do: Go back to the Red Zone. We ended up in Avonside, wandering deserted streets that used to be a subdivision, taking photos of an abandoned play area in what used to be a park. A large tree was growing in front of what used to be a swing. It was surreal, like an episode of the Twilight Zone.
The problem was liquefaction. I'd heard about this in Los Angeles, but never understood what it meant. Basically (and not scientifically), the soil is in layers, and during a prolonged earthquake those layers get shaken up. Imagine a fish tank with a layer of water at the bottom, then a layer of gravel, then a layer of sand. The sand is dry and if you press down on it, it feels quite solid. Now shake the fish tank: the sand gets wet and slips into the gravel, creating a soupy mess. If you press down it, it just squeezes between your fingers. That's liquefaction, and any buildings suddenly lose support, while mud seeps up through the cracks. The EQC (the earthquake commission established in 1993) set a maximum displacement of 50mm (about two inches) for every 10 meters of flooring: If a building fell more than that, it was "red flagged" (not habitable) and eventually demolished.
They then sent a van with a soil probe to map out the area. Any place that had suffered liquefaction was "red zoned" and could not be built on. As I said, the scale was overwhelming:
A lot of people simply moved out of Christchurch. And no wonder: many residents did not have water or power for a month after the earthquake; there were 11,000 aftershocks recorded in the first two years, with more than 30 being magnitude 5.0 or higher; the CBD (central business district) was inaccessible for over two years; Lyttleton Port, the main transportation hub, is still not fully functional. Christchurch lost 2.4% of its population after the earthquakes. Last week I read an article that Cantabrians (people who live in the Canterbury region, where Christchurch is) top the list of antidepressant use. When you consider it's half the size of Auckland, but more people are on antidepressants, that's staggering. Leaving the red zone, we still couldn't get our heads around the size or scale of what had happened.
If Wellington suffered a major quake, we've already been told it could be months before fresh water could be restored, and the two major highways out of town would likely be cut off by landslips so we'd have to way to leave. But that's just the immediate issue of survival; what about the long-term issues? What if every fourth house on our street became an empty lot? Or if every house on our street was demolished? How would we cope if the earth shook two or three times a day for years? The human mind can't fathom it.
On that sad note, we said goodbyes and headed to the airport. I'm used to domestic flights in New Zealand being very laid back: The security screening is minimal, they let you bring liquids, etc. However, on this flight the security was non-existent! You checked in, declared you weren't carrying any dangerous goods, and then boarded the flight! To be fair, it was a prop plane with only about 60 people on it, so they probably just didn't care, but it felt weird.
The advantage of a prop plane is that it flies lower than a jet, so you can actually see some of the landscape. Unfortunately, I immediately fell asleep and didn't wake up until we were landing. (Prop plans also get blown around by the wind a lot more, so that was fun.) Wellington recently reorganised all of its bus routes for absolutely no reason whatsoever, and the Karori bus -- which used to go to Lyall Bay -- now goes past the airport, so we just hopped on that. For $4, it was the best bargain we'd had the whole vacation!
Hopefully I'll get the photos downloaded and post some soon.
* Only in America do they skip the 13th floor.
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