March 1 to 9, Wellington’s will host New Zealand’s first Seaweed Festival, blending science, art, and community engagement to highlight one of the ocean’s hidden treasures: seaweed. T
Led by Zoe Studd, co-founder of the Mountains to Sea Wellington Trust and Love Rimurimu project, she and her team aim to inspire environmental care.
She says Love Rimurimu has been a research, education, and scientific endeavour. “We’ve collaborated with Victoria Uni and NIWA and Taranaki Whanui to bring together knowledge and approaches for the restoration components and so the project that’s been running since 2020 has really had a focus on building knowledge and restoration know-how.”
During the festival, experts like Wendy Nelson, one of New Zealand’s top marine biologists and exclusive tours of Te Papa Museum’s seaweed collections will be part of the unique experiences on offer, as well as culinary events featuring seaweed-infused gins, tastings, and saunas using seaweed beauty products will highlight seaweed’s versatility.
Zoe says “We will have scientific content, not heaps, and that’s actually almost deliberate because one of the things that we’re really trying to achieve with Love Rimurimu is to take marine restoration and marine science, not out of institutions because they’ve got a really important role in institutions, but to bring it far more into the hands of the community.”
She says “We know that people aren’t always that excited about seaweed, you know, usually the thing that they come up with is the last thing that they look at when they’re going for a snorkel, so we wanted to find actually lots of really creative, artistic, fun ways for people to get to know it, and that’s why the programme, it’s really weighted towards the usual things that we do like community snorkels and seaweed swims, but it’s bringing in all these other elements so that people can go to a seaweed tasting, or go foraging on the rocks and learn about different seaweed species and how they can be used.”
One of the festival’s key exhibit, developed with Taranaki Whānui will focus on using natural fibres in seaweed restoration. Zoe says there will be weaving workshops and discussions around restoration from an indigenous perspective.” The festival also includes a seaweed slippery slide—possibly a world first—created by Optical, makers of seaweed-based wetsuit lubricant.
“New Zealand actually has quite a limited culture of seaweed use, but Māori, they used to gather a few species, kāringō and others for eating, but also these things like bull kelp to make storage baskets and things like that. So, you know, there’s lots of fascinating use, but we don’t have the same kind of culinary engagement with seaweeds.” says Zoe.
She hopes the festival will deepen community engagement and encourage conservation.
“Wellington has the most diverse and incredible seaweed forests of any of the cities, and we really do have the most amazing seaweed forest on our doorstep. Auckland can’t access that in the same way, because of the fact that they’re in the inner harbour rather than along a wild coastline”
So will the festival become an annual event? Zoe says “It’s a really small team, but I’m really delighted at all of the contributors and collaborators and how it’s come together, and I think that, yes, I think we will do another one, it may not be next year, But we’re really proud of what we’ve achieved, and I think with little bit more resourcing and a little bit more time, I think it could 100% become an annual event.”
