richard pak
Paris, Fr.

In less than twenty years, Nauru, in Oceania, went from being the richest country in the world to one of the poorest. Its history could be a fable one tells, in which colonialism, delusions of grandeur and greed combined in a reverse alchemy to turn a paradise island into an environmental and economic wasteland. A treasure island that might have done better to leave its treasure buried underground. And yet all of it is entirely real, and The wrecked island gives shape to a disaster that tragically embodies our arrival in the age of the Anthropocene. The series takes up the story of the smallest republic on earth in order to bring out its allegorical dimension, like a warning addressed to the whole planet.

The island is an oval of 21 km² set down on the Pacific Ocean, and the sailor approaching it will think he is seeing a coral atoll with all the trappings of a tropical paradise. But once ashore he will realise that the island is devastated, both literally and figuratively. On Nauru everything begins, and ends, with the phosphate that a German geologist discovered by chance at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mining started soon after, carried out by a succession of foreign powers that impoverished Nauru’s soil in order to enrich their own.

At independence in 1968, the hundreds of millions of dollars generated by the mining industry made the new state the richest on the globe, and it redistributed them very generously among its population. Overnight, a nation of fishermen with a traditional culture became massively wealthy, adopted the Western way of life and spent without counting. These were boom years, in which an entire people, now living off unearned income, forgot the essentials and accumulated the superfluous, throwing things away and replacing them at once, living without a thought for the next day. Tomorrow will take care of itself, people said at the time.

The young state invested its fortune in a vast portfolio of property and land through the Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust. In 1977 it even had the tallest building in Melbourne constructed, named “Nauru House”. The underlying aim was to display the young nation’s success to the world.

But the day of reckoning came in the mid-1990s, when the phosphate ran out and with it the island’s almost exclusive source of income. Between delusions of grandeur, corruption and the inexperience of those in charge, the property investments proved catastrophic and were sold off at a loss. An economic and ecological disaster, the country sank and became one of the poorest on the planet.

At the turn of the twentieth century the whole of the island was covered in dense tropical forest; today it is largely an uninhabitable desert. The population is concentrated on the narrow coastal strip, with its deceptive air of tropical Eden. But topside, the central plateau that makes up four fifths of the atoll, looks like a field of ruins, where pinnacles rise as far as the eye can see — coral columns left behind by a century of mechanical shovels tearing out the phosphate that once enclosed them.

I photographed the dichotomy of the Nauruan topos: on one side the turquoise water of the lagoon and the palm trees that ring the island; on the other, just behind those few trees that no longer hide any forest, landscapes of desolation. On my return I subjected the negatives to a chemical treatment based on phosphoric acid. The process alters the emulsion, sparing only the range of reds, producing an aesthetic that carries us towards (science) fiction. Like the country as a whole, these originals, sacrificed in phosphate, come out of it irreversibly transformed and impoverished.

The road that runs around the island is punctuated by car carcasses eaten away by rust and by abandoned petrol stations. A legacy of the years of prosperity, when money was spent without counting: if a car broke down it was left where it stood and immediately replaced. Scattered across the landscape, these wrecks evoke tragic oxidised icons of our hyper-consumerist societies, which give little thought to tomorrow.

On that same road, by day and by night, an army of sweepers is engaged in an absurd ballet, chasing the phosphate dust that covers the entire island. A perpetual procession of Sisyphus-women of all ages who, in a vain battle lost in advance, struggle to clear away the dust of men’s greed.

And yet, out of all this vaguely dispiriting mire, the laughter of carefree children breaks through. Indifferent to the wanderings of those who appropriated their land and of their own elders, they throw themselves into the water. And back come to me the words of that young Nauruan woman who would not leave for anything in the world, and would not deprive her children of the happiness she had of growing up on her island.

 

Project funded by the Cnap, La Fondation des Artistes and the « Prix Photographie & Sciences » (Résidence 1+2)