Mark Adams & Nicholas Thomas
Cook's Sites: Revisiting History is the outcome of two significant projects merging around a shared field of investigation: specifically, Captain James Cook's visits to Dusky Sound and Queen Charlotte Sound in the South Island of New Zealand. For Mark Adams, the project has involved extensive documentation of complicated cultural sites, from Samoan tattooing to the historic landscapes in the South Island where Maori and Pakeha history have collided, often brutally. In Nicholas Thomas's case, the project includes New Zealand as part of a larger exploration of the cultural dynamics found in settler societies, and in the accompanying instances of cross-cultural interaction that take place.
Cook's Sites takes both these projects back to the moment of contact around which various foundational histories of New Zealand have been constructed. What makes this project so strong is the acknowledgment that such histories are created and sustained via different kinds of representations: visual, textual and historiographical. Adams and Thomas engage all three.
There are really two Cook's Sites under review here. The first is the exhibition of Adams's photographs held in the Boulevard gallery at Te Papa; the second is the book titled Cook's Sites, in which text and image describe alternative but parallel approaches to the same subjects. Surprisingly, there was often a large gap between the show and the book, not so much a result of the problem of text in exhibitions but of Te Papa's decision to intervene between Thomas's text and the viewer, thus altering his role within the project.
Sometimes, too, the translation of Thomas's text was less than precise, as when the wall text spoke of Thomas and Adams finding Johann Reinhold Forster's diary to