Zoonoses

Malcolm Doidge, 2023.

Zoonoses is the plural of zoonosis, that is, any disease or infection naturally transmissible from vertebrate animals to humans. Zoonotic pathogens are bacterial, viral, parasitic, and maybe spread (not exclusively) through consuming food, water, or in the environment.

The 2019-23 Covid-19 pandemic was of zoonotic origin. Now receding from collective memory, evidence for its outbreak overwhelmingly implicated human encroachment into natural environments, impinging on reservoirs of disease within animal populations. Other well-known diseases with zoonotic origins are plague, HIV, Ebola, rabies.

Aotearoa/New Zealand’s capital city, Wellington, is girdled by sandy beaches and the steep cliffs of Pōneke’s deep, south-facing harbour. Mātiu/Somes Island anchors a group of smaller harbour islands within Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Port Nicholson.

A digital triptych, Zoonoses, uses dawn to dusk video timelapse and video made with a 360˚ monoscopic camera on Mātiu/Somes Island, filmed from within its historic, human, and animal quarantine buildings. The three Zoonoses clips use a water shader/dolly camera backdrop within a Unity game engine. Most of the sound was of field recordings from Mātiu/Somes Island.

The mana whenua and kaitiakitanga of this Island resides with the iwi collective, Taranaki Whānui ki te Upoko ō te Ika a Maui. Mātiu/Somes Island’s ownership was regained by iwi from the Crown in 2009 as part of a cultural redress.
Doidge, M. (2020). Mātiu/Somes Island, August 31st. [Panorama]. Human and animal quarantine sites
looking south to Te wāhi o te ahi tipua (Historic heavy AA battery defence site).


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