Christchurch revisited
There’s a few uncanny aspects in a return to Christchurch: the strange knowledge of the city where I had residence for a couple of years, a familiarity filtered through the opaque glass of time; after the earthquake, Feb 2011 version, the city has only recently been opened up, more than half the buildings demolished, the large ones still standing have all been vacant for the 2.5 subsequent years; but the most unsettling respect is that of vacancy, where once there was a bustling city centre with 1000 people in the lunchtime crowds swirling around, now there’s a handful, the Columbo St corner with ¾ of the structure missing, that shop where I bought my secondhand Olympus OM2n just a patch of weedy gravel, the stretch of bars on Oxford Terrace completely gone, a hoarding with a huge pile of gravel beyond.
The question is how to recreate, create, any life in this once remarkably diverse and truly beautiful city, now an apparent war zone casualty.