Quake City

Abstract

In ‘Quake City: From Ruination to Representation’, Sharon Mazer looks at the shoehorning of experience into a prescribed social frame in not-quite-post-earthquake Christchurch, New Zealand. Quake City – Christchurch's Earthquake Attraction was built by the Canterbury Museum. Safely set into a repurposed shipping container on the Re:Start Mall, Quake City advertises itself as a ‘unique multi-sensory attraction aimed at informing, engaging and educating New Zealanders and international tourists about the Canterbury earthquakes.’ As such, Quake City is this essay's paradigm for the way the forces of nature are forced into line by the machinery of the state.When the earth shakes, time, body and consciousness are suspended, lifted from the everyday and then dropped back into whatever's left, how ever it's been left. From solid to liquid, from standing to fallen, from edifice to rubble, from order to . well, we don't quite know yet what. Earthquakes, aftershocks, earthquakes again: the physical ruptures the metaphysical, at once absolute and transcendent, abject and sublime.As the visceral sensations began to recede, we were told, repeatedly, that we must ‘tell our stories’. Not in the way we did while riding the adrenaline rush of those first few days, sharing with strangers at supermarkets or over strangely convivial ad hoc meals made from the detritus of warming fridges over barbeques and gas stoves, debating relative virtues of improvised toilets. Our stories now have been sifted from the fragments of memory, ground into the generic, locked into hegemonic templates, eroded into clichés of terror, loss, recovery and, of course, the triumph of the human spirit. They are being produced for purification, to re-repress what was released by ruination.