Desiderium – What Stood Here is an augmented reality land art installation combining a physical artefact, practical lighting, and a real-time 3D AR environment to visualise a representation of one of New Zealand’s least-known environmental atrocities, the loss of 99% of the ngãhere/forest in Banks Peninsula.
The installation, which will premiere at the World Press Photo 2026 & Doc Edge Immersive Exhibition in Auckland, 24 June – 12 July, centres on a single stump recovered from Te Pātaka o Rākaihautū | Banks Peninsula, incorporated into the installation as a physical AR marker. A ‘regeneration’ of the forest with gaussian splat captures emulates the native ecosystem that would have once surrounded the tree before it was felled.
Before European settlement, the peninsula was covered in dense podocarp forest, with some tree specimens being nearly a thousand years old. Within fifty years of colonisation, 99% of this forest was gone. It was felled by one of the dozens of sawmills that erupted on Banks Peninsula to build homes in Christchurch and beyond, or it was simply burned to make way for farmland pastures. By 1920, less than one percent of the original forest cover remained. The transformation was so complete that the loss has become nearly invisible, there is almost nothing but a scattering of stumps to compare the current landscape against.
The Desiderium project, led by Ellie Adams, was supported by the Faculty of Arts Digital Research Seed Fund
Details of the Auckland festival are available here. There will be another chance to see Desiderium when the festival visits Christchurch 31 July – 2 August.