New member: Christopher Robbins



I am Christopher Robbins, and as the newest member of the Nauru Project, I thought I'd take this first post to introduce myself.

I first got to know Nauru while working at the University of the South Pacific from 2002-2005, a University with campuses on 12 different island nations including Nauru, Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Niue, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. While conducting a research and development project at the Nauru campus, I was deeply struck by this little island with a hole in the middle, sitting plop in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.



I began to write about my experiences on Nauru, create sculptures based on Nauru, and make my own frenzied plots for saving this little island.



Almost five years later, I'm still thinking about Nauru: as an insanely compressed microcosm of the environmental reaping we are all involved in, as an almost metaphysical take on capitalism as a way of coping with the aftermath of this extreme mining, and as examples of the vibrant daily life that perseveres in this moon-scaped tropical paradise.

This summer, at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, I focused on Nauru, building a life-sized New England replica of a 4m x 4m x 4m slice of this island in rural Maine, as a platform for exploring possibilities for action on the pinnacles left from the mining, and attempting to deflower my own hangups around Nauru as an object or source.



I have collected a number of my old posts on Nauru from my own blog here for you, and look forward to using The Nauru Project as a venue for continuing to explore Nauru as a place, a people, a symbol, and a project.