Liquid Land | Rena Effendi

Rena Effendi Liquid Land

Rena Effendi

Liquid Land

liquid land Rena Effendi

I co-authored Liquid Land with my father Rustam Effendi, a dissident scientist and entomologist who devoted his life to studying, hunting and collecting over 30,000 butterflies in the Soviet Union. Inherited by the Azerbaijani State Institute of Zoology after his death in 1991, a large part of his collection has disintegrated.

Alongside thousands of glass boxes filled with butterfly dust, locked away in the dark corridors of the Zoology Institute, the only other visual evidence remaining of his life’s work is the fifty photographs of endangered butterflies for a manuscript he never published.

Next to my father’s dead but iridescent butterflies, my photographs show life in some of the world’s most polluted areas, near Baku, where I was born and grew up.

In my mind, the contrasting images gravitate towards each other - as I have to my father. Since working on this book I have gotten to know him much better than when he was alive.

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Our beds were separated from the living room by a stack of wooden bookshelves, and I remember one night falling asleep next to him, talking about dinosaurs; he told me how they lived and what was before and after them. He also told me that he did not believe in life on other planets because they lacked oxygen and other atmospheric layers essential to the development of life as he knew it. That night I also learned that there was no such thing as God, but that there was design and harmony in nature, and I first heard about Darwin. I was disappointed when he told me that the average lifespan of butterflies was rarely more than a week.

Yet he massacred over thirty thousand of them, piercing pins through each fluffy thorax, mummifying them with chemicals, and encasing them in glass boxes with male and female species of one family in a line, their cryptic Latin names written down in pencil.

I watched his fingers spreading the tender wings, his hands perfectly steady, not one hair lost, not one limb smashed or damaged, as he kept the butterflies intact, even in death.

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Once he took me on a butterfly hunt with him; I was seven years old and not used to the outdoors. The bumpy bus ride to the mountains of Zagatala made me sick. We camped out in the middle of a quiet green field full of grazing cows.

I remember being terrified of cows, and I panicked when one of them approached me, running off and losing my shoe; the cow stepped on it and passed listlessly by. In the morning, after a full night of rain, the mattress inside my tent was damp and, wobbly from a sleepless night, I tried catching butterflies in the still morning air. I got one in the net and then picked it up; my fingers rubbed off its fluff, leaving bold smudges on its wings and powder on my fingers’ tips. I held the velvety wings and felt the insect vibrating in a final tremor, and then, taken by guilt, I let it go. The butterfly limped away, somehow managing to fly.

“Its life will be much shorter now that you touched it…” my father said, and I felt even worse.

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I have grown closer to my father since he died. When he was alive, I focused mostly on his faults - his being away most of my childhood and his putting work ahead of family. I always envied his obsession, his passion and when I first faced the streets with a camera, I finally understood what his roaming butterfly hunts meant to him. And though I did not inherit his shadow, he passed on to me something that changed the course of my own life: his spirit of searching for the unknown. My father’s death allowed me to look at him with a different set of eyes. He was no longer just a father - he was a person. In my attempts to understand his creative urges and to explore my own, I followed his butterfly journal, visiting the regions of the country where he hunted, and the State Institute of Zoology where he worked all his life. It was there that I collected some of my first photographs, absurd and haunting - images somehow linked to my father but also the beginning of me as a photographer.

From left to right: Coppersmith’s favourite cat. Lahich, Azerbaijan. 2003.

Pelican at the exhibition of birds and snakes. Baku, Azerbaijan. 2002.

Monument to kolkhoz worker. Astara, Azerbaijan. 2003.

Room inside a room. Salyan, Azerbaijan. 2002.

Giraffe. Basement of the State Zoology Institute. Baku, Azerbaijan. 2003.

Shark. Taxidermy Museum at the State Zoology Institute. Baku, Azerbaijan. 2003.

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liquid land on an endangered species of people

Rena Effendi

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