The Things We Leave Behind

New Zealand writer and photographer Kayt Bronnimann’s travels have taken her everywhere from Romania, and Bougainville to Taiwan where she currently lives. As well as writing articles on subjects including Taiwan’s tea culture, the Yanshui Beehive Fireworks Festival, and the island’s MeToo movement, Bronnimann has been busy photographing life in Taiwan. Bronnimann’s photography takes the spotlight in a new solo exhibition, The Things We Leave Behind, at Lei Gallery in Taichung City.

Bronnimann first began taking photographs on a trip around Eastern Europe back in 2007. But it was after moving to Taichung City in Taiwan in 2008 that her interest in photography really caught fire.

“I bought a DSLR camera shortly after moving to Taiwan,” she says. “It was such a new and interesting culture and different from anywhere I’d ever been. I wanted to go out and take pictures. I’d get on my scooter and go for a drive or walk around. That’s how I got into it.”

Taiwan-based photographer Kayt Bronnimann/ image Ema Chang

She says she considers the environment in Taiwan endlessly stimulating. “You can just wander down the street and there’s always something there. There’s a temple or an old Japanese building or two guinea pigs sitting on a slab of concrete, eating grass at a night market. I never feel bored. I feel like I can walk down the same street every day and still discover something new.”

The exhibition finds Bronnimann in a reflective mood, casting her mind back to different episodes in her life and the photographic traces that remain. It is a scattershot of memories: photographs of Northland, New Zealand, where she spent her early childhood; Datong in China, looking out over what was the old city; Fiji; the streets of Taiwan; and the island of Bougainville, where she lived in 2017 for ten months working as a volunteer at the Bureau for Public Affairs, publicising the island’s then-forthcoming independence referendum.

The photographs are noticeable for their absence of people. They focus on the structures that contain human life rather than the humans themselves. “I really like places and old buildings,” Bronnimann says. “It’s this idea of space and place, and these things that are not always seen or noticed… places that have been left behind. I like the melancholia these pictures evoke. I like that kind of emotion.”

The Lei Gallery in Taichung, Taiwan / image Ema Chang

Bronnimann’s fascination with old, often dilapidated buildings began in Taiwan, where she has taken a particular interest in the island’s many “mosquito halls”. “These are failed or ambitious government projects,” she explains, “community swimming pools, marketplaces, industrial complexes.

All this money went into these projects that never went anywhere. All that’s left behind are mosquitoes. It’s almost like these places are frozen in time.”

It was a different sense of abandonment she encountered in Bougainville where the shadow of the territory’s civil conflict between 1988 and 1998 still loomed large. “I think everyone I met there who is my age or older has memories from that time,” she says.

“There were women who had to give birth in the jungle. Some women lost their children to malaria because there were no health services anymore.”   

Bougainville’s history of colonisation is extremely complicated. After World War 2, the territory was placed under Australian control as part of the UN Trust Territory of New Guinea.

But when Australia granted independence to Papua New Guinea in 1975, Bougainville became part of the new country. It was a fraught union that erupted into civil war in 1988 when Bougainville seceded.

Bouganville's abandoned Panguna copper mine/ image Kayt Bronnimann

In Bougainville, Bronnimann focused her camera on the territory’s controversial Panguna copper mine; disputes surrounding the mine in large part sparked the civil war. “Up until the 1960s, there was nothing,” she says. “No one knew the copper was there.” What was discovered was one of the largest copper deposits in the world.

“Papua New Guinea was still tied to Australia and all this investment flowed in and they developed the mine,” Bronnimann says. “But all the profits were going to Papua New Guinea or the Australian mining company.

“Papua New Guinea gained independence from Australia in 1975, but Bougainville didn’t. There was a lot of simmering resentment and the mine was a catalyst. The Bougainville Revolutionary Army sabotaged it… It was a very fractious time. The mine has become a symbol of that time.”

As well as disputes over the economic distribution of the spoils from the mine, the environmental degradation it caused was another major point of contention. “It’s polluted a lot of the waterways,” Bronnimann says. “The river there is a bright blue from all the copper.

“The place is so eerie because there’s all this fallen machinery. There’s a pit at the bottom that’s sucking water constantly, so all you can hear is this sucking sound. A guy that I worked with told me that once a van got sucked in there, though I don’t know if that was an apocryphal story.”  

An abandoned house in Northland/ image Kayt Bronnimann

Looking back on a rich panoply of experiences, Bronnimann is only too aware of how little tangible remains. A handful of photographs and a few scrawled notes are all that endure, while memory fades.

She contemplates the recording of our personal and collective histories. “What gets archived?” she asks. “What do we put in museums? What gets to be remembered in history, and what gets forgotten?”

 The Things We Leave Behind runs at Lei Gallery in Taichung until May 14.

- Asia Media Centre