Liquid Land | Rena Effendi

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Rena Effendi

Liquid Land

liquid land Rena Effendi

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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 landon an endangered species of people

Rena Effendi

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