Anubumin

Editors note:

The documentation of this presentation comes from Human: the Third Biennial PARSE Research Conference (2019).

Oliver Ressler discusses the film “Anubumin”, carried out in collaboration with Zanny Begg in 2017.

The film focuses on Nauru, a tiny remote island in the Pacific with 10,000 inhabitants. The narration discusses different voids that have shaped the islands past and future. The largest void is a physical one, the island is a raised reef consisting of calcite and phosphate on a volcanic base, which since 1906 has been mined and exported to Australia, to fertilise the former colonisers’ farms. When phosphate extraction came to a stop in the 1980s, Nauru was bankrupt and 80 percent of the land area uninhabitable and infertile. In an attempt to generate income, in the 1990s Nauru became a prime money-laundering haven. After the disappearance of soil and money, today Nauru involves in the “disappearance of people” – housing one of Australia’s offshore refugee detention centres. In a reaction to the criticism on terrible human right situation in the detention centre, Nauru severely restricted access to the island. Four whistleblowers, who worked as doctors and nurses in the detention centre, describe the institutionalised human rights violations in the offshore detention. Today a new void threatens the island, rising sea-levels threaten the coastal edge, which is the only area left for its inhabitants to live.

Anubumin – A film by Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler 18 min., 2017: https://vimeo.com/237139314

Oliver Ressler web site: http://www.ressler.art