Dr. Carol E. Mayer is the head curator for the MOA’s new exhibition, In the Footprint of the Crocodile Man, the very first contemporary art exhibition of work from the Sepik River region in Papua New Guinea. The 27 pieces of art on display are accompanied by a grim story of environmental and cultural threat to the Sepik River and its peoples. When I sat down with her, Dr. Mayer spoke joyously and effusively about her trips to the region and why she thinks this is an important story to tell.
Dr. Mayer begins by explaining how she got interested in the region in the first place. She says she saw pictures of the Solomon Islands in an undergrad anthropology class at UBC and was hooked. The first time she visited the region she was on a mission to give an artist there his plane ticket to do an artist’s residency at UBC. This should give you an idea of the region’s remoteness. “You have to go through mosquito clouds to get there, among other things,” she explains. As luck would have it, a few years later a prolific collector of Sepik art gave his collection to the MOA. Mayer took this as a sign that they should do an exhibit and, more importantly, that she should visit again. Before her second visit, in perhaps another stroke of fate, Mayer learned of a mine scheduled to go into the Sepik region in 2016. “All of a sudden I felt the fragile balance between wanting people to appreciate art and to understand that this region is in danger.” When she spoke to Sepik artists “there was a sense of incredible hopelessness, because there was no one they could tell.”
Mayer is wary, however, of getting on a soapbox. “I think it’s too easy to rant, to get on your pedestal.” So she contacted the other side- a mining company called Pan Aust. “The mining company didn’t invade the country,” she says. “There’s never one bad guy.” Pan Aust, likely in an attempt to preserve their image, sent Mayer a document recognizing the chagrin of the Sepik people and promising to respect their Indigenous rights and the environment. When I ask Mayer if she trusts the company she pauses for a moment. “I think I trust the person I’m working with.” But she concedes that “in a big corporation, in the end, money speaks louder than anything.” But to prevent what she calls “sneaky and not so ethically sound” things she insists transparency is the answer. “This exhibit makes them more accountable, in a public way.” Mayer herself has taken steps to hold the company accountable, by connecting the Sepik people with a project called Global Rivers which will continually test the health of their river. In the last few decades the mine at Ok Tedi, also in Papua New Guinea, was deemed an environmental hazard, all people were forced to evacuate, and the region is now uninhabitable. It’s Papua New Guinea’s Chernobyl. “The mining company got away with murder, and there wasn’t enough transparency,” Mayer says. The Sepik people are all too familiar with Ok Tedi.
Mayer is quick to point out Canada’s involvement in the region; “Oh, we’re in there,” she says grimly. But she resists cynicism. “If I was really cynical I wouldn’t give a voice to the mining company,” she says. “I think it’s more nuanced.”
Museum-goers, she believes, should be free to decide how they feel at the end of the exhibit. “We try to give people as much info as we can, so they can do their own research. The museum is a place of discourse. You can’t force people to make change.”
Mayer is not unaware of the parallels between the Sepik peoples struggles and those of the Indigenous communities here on the Northwest Coast. Indigenous peoples have been on the front lines of the fight against the environmental threats of big corporations, with the added weight of fighting for their own rights and recognition. Mayer has arranged for a local chief and activist to come to the museum and speak.
After we’re done talking about the mining company a weight lifts from the conversation. It’s clear Mayer feels a connection and responsibility to the Sepik people. She tells me a story of a Sepik woman who, while weaving baskets, referred to Mayer as her sister. “You often hear anthropologists talk about their “family” in the places they visit, and I usually don’t like it, but this was great.”
When she visits she admits that her formal titles of curator and anthropologist fly out the window. “You rely on people totally. You’re unable to take care of yourself.”
She’s very interested in reattaching the language of the peoples to their artwork – there are 300 languages in the region alone – because it allows the people to take ownership of their work even when it’s far away in “a big, metropolitan museum,” as they say. Despite the region’s remoteness and isolation, Mayer is wary to cast an ethnographic lens to their art on display. She is scornful when talking about past practices of anthropologists; “I used to think they were terrible. They’d go into communities for two years, do their research for their PhD, and then never go back.” She put a lot of thought into how to display the Sepik art. Her conclusion is something she calls “the space in between.” Their art isn’t put on “white paper like contemporary art or on brown paper with pictures of bucolic villages and little kids, the ethnographic lens.” She smiles secretly when she tells me what she’s done, not wanting to give away too much. She says that the exhibit emphasizes “the importance of the micro world,” with, for example, close up shots of cassowary bird feathers and artwork laid on silk that mimics the iridescence of the Sepik River. Because, she concludes, “if anything happens, it’s the micro world that gets affected- the animals, the plants, the people.”
In The Footprint of the Crocodile Man opens at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC on March 1st and runs through January 31st of next year. Entrance is free to students with your ID card!