 Let's start. Start. Yes. Super. If everyone, please take their seats. Everyone in the back, please join us. That'd be fabulous. We're going to reconfigure for the last lecture for today, the second day of Innovate Heritage. Well, after this, we'll have a two-hour dinner break, which is independent from the conference. I hope you all have made lots of nice friends and are going to have little dinner parties. No. Yes, and then we'll reconvene for the evening performances, which I'm very much looking forward to. Yes, so I just want to introduce our next lecture, is a lecture performance in some ways. From what I understand, Rosanna Raymond, who I've had the privilege of seeing do a performance at the Dalin Museum, about a month ago or so, and she's a really fabulous artist and curator as well, and lots of other things, but I'm going to let her fill in the gap. So please help me welcome Rosanna Raymond. Thanks. Right. I've got to put the timer on in case I start waffling. Okay. I know. I'm not very microphone trained. Okay. How's that? It's like he was going to eat it. My goodness. Okay. I cry the ocean. I bleed the earth. I greet you with my dead. Now, may my waters greet your waters. May my mountains greet your mountains. And may my people greet your people. Ta alofa lava. And may we take this moment to acknowledge the past, for we are the genealogical matter of the ancestors. We are the past. We are the present. We are the future. So warm Pacific greetings, everybody. And I know that's... I don't know why people think the Pacific people are so scary. We're lovely, really. But again, I'd just like to thank the organisers for giving me this luxurious space to share some of my art practice with you. And I'd just like to also thank Denise for that beautiful presentation. And I think there's a lot of things that you talked about that actually have great resonance for some of the things that I'm going to say, as did some of the talks that we had today and wanted to get some really sort of exciting debates that we started in terms of space. So this is the first time I've sort of written a bit of a paper. I usually just talk, but it felt like it's time that I did maybe start to formalise some of these things that I've been working through my practice as an artist who works with museums and higher education institutions, sort of where I focus on issues of Pacific modernity and concentrating on my art practice. So my primary voice is one of an artist. I fabricate, I articulate, I installate and I activate spaces. So let's see what I've got here. Oh, no. Oh, I've lost it. Never mind. Anyway, so the Moana, New York, Kiwa. So the Pacific Ocean covers one third of the Earth's surface, littered with over 30,000 islands and people's totaling around about the nine and a half million mark with 22 main islands. So I did have a lovely slide of Aotearoa, where I was born. So this is named after the long white clouds by a race who traversed the ocean and double-hulled canoes before the birth of Christ. So you might recognise Aotearoa as New Zealand. So this comes complete with a union jack on our flag and the Queen of England as our sovereign. So I have an urban Polynesian upbringing with all the complexities that this entails. It is motorways I grew up with, not coconut trees. So, and this is usually how I would articulate this sort of thing. So what have we got here? Aotearoa, rendered. I am your bastard child, half-caste with colonial past. You cannot return me to sender. I have a shared illegitimacy with her majesty. An introduced species gone native, now in the custody of Papa Tuanuku. She calls my name. We talk long and loud and full of laughter. When I am not looking, she whispers to me and tells me of her granddaughter, the red clay lady, whose daughter I shall meet on the way to Hawaii. Samoa, a next. I was a child lost to you, oh, but I found you. Did you have trouble recognizing me? A pale sena, my petals bruised, weeping slightly centered in the sun. My shape shifted, reformed with urban virility. Jesus Christ and Elvis Presley served to me on a platter with a silver spur and stuffed in my mouth and a cow jumping over the moon. Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been? You cried, oh, well, I've been to London to visit the queen. I replied, what was it you recognized? Was it Hawaii? England. Endeavoured. I'm a long overdue reminder of your colonial karma, complete with a history of your family drama. You came in a rush. We thought you had pierced the sky. You laid claim to me with a treaty, or should we say, treatment. Your Commonwealth costing us $3 to a pound paid in flesh through a sequence of no sense. Which doctors, spin doctors? I mean, which was what? And whatever. Because in the space in between, there's a jubilee with no space for me and certainly no mention of Hawaii. It's my mate. I don't know why these ones aren't working. What if it's dropping them? There's Polynesia. OK, so Polynesia has no word for art in the Western sense. There was no need, really. It was woven into the very fabric of our society. We did have words for artisans, tafunga, tafunga, loosely translated as expert, and a vast artistic heritage that goes back 3,000 years. I know we're just babies in tune of the greater world and their histories. And actually, this has been a big hindrance within the museum world where we're not considered as old and as, say, the great histories of Egypt and the Middle East. And that has actually directly impacted on the value that is given to our beautiful treasures that are found all through the museums in the world. So the practical and the beautiful coexist used in social activities, rituals. They circulated through society in a constant cycle of reciprocation and through the maintenance of the relationships that they were forged. Well, there's Aotearoa. So you can see no coconut trees in Aotearoa. Speechmaking was considered the highest art form, words, the food of chiefs. The tafunga were held in high esteem. They were well paid as they bought much mana, prestige, and prosperity to the village. The works contained important oral histories, usually having personal names. They are our libraries, our churches, our houses of parliament, our museums, our Google. We wear them. We use them. We render them on our bodies. And in the Western sense, a lot of these have been reduced to craft or decorative arts. I mean, we didn't even have a word for decorative art. There's no such concept. They were very pragmatic people. And a lot of the things you see in museums are meant to be wrapped around the body. So they've gone through a journey as they've entered the museum space. There's one of our houses. And here it is on the body. These really are our libraries and our museums and our Googles. These are not just pretty little decorations for the skin. This is in Dalam. OK. So many of these art forms are traded and exchanged on first contact to the non-Talmaori world. They were brought straight back to Europe by the first explorers, where they were immediately entered the public imagination through exhibitions, talks, publications, journals, and reports from these intrepid travellers. So not much has changed, really, has it, in 250 years of collecting and displaying and the talking about of these things. So it has been mainly through the museum glass case. Did I have one back here? Sorry. That you have probably experienced the art and cultural heritage of Polynesia. Now, again, Polynesia is another highly contested and problematic term that was gifted to us by the great Western world. But it is actually not particularly helpful in terms of the way they split Polynesia up into this great Te Moana Nuiakia into Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, based very much on how dark skinned or how curly the hair was. And these actually do not truly reflect the integration and the oral histories of connection that our people had. So when you go to, say, Dalam, and you go to Melanesia, then you go to Micronesia, and then you go to Polynesia. So very good at creating borders that didn't exist before. So maybe it's here in these museums that you've met these beautiful treasures out of context without its living dynamic, darkly lit, to preserve its physical life steeped with anthropological overtones and much theory. Or maybe it's in the tribal art magazines, expensive, untainted with modernity, a commodity to be bought and sold, an artwork with its histories cleansed and ready for life on a shelf, in a box, or on a wall. So I have a lived experience of my culture. My celebration of my cultural heritage is fused into the work as an artist. I cannot produce artworks, write poems, and create costumes without the knowledge of my cultural heritage and the experience of living in. Producing artworks is my way of putting my culture into the future, into the now, not into the things past box, making it relevant to me as a modern Pacific person. So I think here we see a beautiful, and this is in the Dalai Museum here in Berlin. They're these beautiful double-holed canoes, very much presented from the past. And these are photos that I just took on my last trip in Aotearoa, actually on the Moana, in one of those double-holed canoes. So it's a very lived experience, which, because of the distance, many of you might not ever have contact with. These are a collage, an archive, an artwork called Eyeland. It's actually called La'a Lungale for Nualemata, a walk through where my eyes land. And this is when, at a time in New Zealand, New Zealand has a bi-cultural policy. So it very much talks to the Mana whenua, the Māori people of the land, and the settler community. In about the 1970s, opened the door to the Pacific Island communities for cheap labour, such a familiar story, where they were brought in to work in the factories, to work on a lot of the low-pay jobs that most New Zealanders wouldn't work in. And this created a whole new wave of migration in the Pacific. And so I'm the result of a third generation New Zealand-born, Samoan, Tuvaloan, Māori, Irish, French mix. And this is the sort of thing that we dealt with. So this part of this artwork was revealing to Auckland the fact that we existed, because the only time you really saw Pacific Island faces was when it was in the newspaper as an overstayer, where it was in a crime watch program. It's like same story in terms of an immigrant community coming into another community that has a very mainstream thing. So that was one of my first actual, oh look, then in 1999, my whole world changed. So I moved away from a lot of that context that I just showed you. And I moved to London with my husband and children. So moving out of the Pacific has affected how I work and why I work in so many different ways, the good, the bad, and sometimes incredibly ugly. But new modes of work were needed. I no longer had access to my usual materials. And there was a very indifferent art world with very little interest in the Pacific art, where certainly don't have a value in the art market. So therefore it's very hard to find any spaces that will actually let you have a voice, let you even show your presence because we're of absolutely no value to them in terms of money. They love the art, so interesting. But basically bottom line, who's gonna buy it? And this is a reality in terms of the art world and in terms of, yeah, and as an artist you like to make a living too. So England was very, very challenging. So, and the one thing I'd left behind was my taonga, all my living treasures, all my community, my elders, the people who fed me, who nurtured me through knowledge, through having just a space and a voice. So I actually went to the next best thing really, I actually went to the museums because as far as I was concerned, my community lived in these museums. Maybe they weren't animate, or maybe they weren't living, but they were certainly part of my community. So we call these cultural treasures taonga. You may know that the word artifact. Artifact is one aspect of being a taonga. You take away the story, you take away its personal name, you take away the context and you're taking away a lot of the, you are reducing it to a mere object. It's very easy to erase its history, it's very easy to forget about the relationships that it once had as it circulated through the community. So the museum and all its form and functions is one that simultaneously stimulates me and horrifies me. So it's not my natural habitat, but living away from my homelands, it has become a very important place to me, culturally, creatively, I can't say that word, professionally. It's a challenging space to negotiate. To me the museum itself is an artifact of colonial colonization and imperialism, and this legacy is so deeply embedded in the core of most museum cultures and policies. So I tread softly, sometimes painfully so, aware that if I act out of step, I may never be invited back. So I have learnt the rules and regulations, implemented a few of my own, and act appropriately as ultimately, the invitation and access rights are firmly in the courts of the institution, with the emphasis still placed firmly on the Anglo-Western knowledge expert frameworks. So there's very little room for indigenous epistemologies and ontonologies, they're sort of relegated to quaint world views, and they're not usually welcomed in terms of analytical prowess. So it's very much marginalized in a hierarchy where the privilege of the Western knowledge base is firmly upfront. But the museum is most exciting to me when it is a place of confluence, the past and the present, the voices of the community, the artists, the intellect, finding a space to create, speculate, articulate, mediate, explore and learn. The best experiences and the most productive I've had have been projects where I've had the opportunity to build up long-term working relationships with the staff and the institution or been involved right from the beginning. So not the clip on at the end when the money has already been allocated to other areas, or even more importantly, staff time and programming, which has already been timetabled. So a lot of the staff are not in the position to help with any extra requests. And I find extra is usually quite a good metaphor of the artist inside the museum. So lack of real communication and pre-production time hinders the development of new ideas and possibilities more so than the lack of money. I have never let money become a reason for why I won't do something. And in a commodity-based world, it's quite challenging, but sometimes the choice is nothing. And it does eventually pay off, my goodness. So this led to me, this is Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. And this is one of the first major projects that I worked on in England. So as I started to work inside the museums, I started to go to symposiums and conferences like this. I started to realize I actually had a voice and I started to use it. And it was quite hard on both sides at first. We're speaking very different languages. We were finding spaces where we could both be heard and acknowledge each other. So it's always, but it was incredibly stimulating for me. And I ended up working on a show called Pacific Styles. This brought over 26 artists from Aotearoa. So we got them to, because I was really, I was in this privileged space where I was in these spaces working with our taonga. Some of them hadn't seen the light of day for 150 years. These taonga were dormant. They were in a very dormant stage. And I was like, how did I end up in the position where I'm the person that opens that box? So I wanted to share this with a lot of my contemporaries and we changed the, and inhabited and reactivated and revived the collections. And this was highly contentious. There's lots of issues of the art world warning a lot of the artists that they would be just artificing their work and that they would just be turned into informants and artifacts and why indeed did they want to engage with this highly contested space. But 26 artists wanted to, and a lot of it was about the fact that they were wanting to connect and this activate the space between them and the thing. So this was up for two years. We had a festival. We had a whole running program. Took us two years to fundraise. We actually had to completely restructure some of the museum's infrastructure because they just literally had never worked with living people on that scale. So things in boxes are quite easy to deal with. You don't need to feed them. You don't need to house them. You don't have to answer their emails. You don't have to chase them. So it's a very new space that these museums are having to work with. And so these are some of the images. This is a montage. So this was actually a visual essay from some of the works. This one over here was actually had the box and it had sort of a head in it and he had placed those microphones and he had all this imagined, sort of caught it all, this imagined talk that you would have. So the museum was amazing. They opened up their stores to us but this was after somebody like myself being able to bridge these gaps because I had worked with the museum for five years so I sort of trained them up a little bit, got them all used to, kind of. And ended up being a wonderful experience for both. This is our living room. So every museum should have a living room, I feel. So we just had, we put a lot of context into the videos. So a lot of people were surprised to see such modern images and this is actually a very good publication, if I don't say so myself, called Pacifica Styles, Artists Inside the Museums and it's a multi-voice book which has the voice of the academic, the voice of the artist, the voice of the conservator, all sharing the same space. So all giving each other that mana, that dignity rather than the expense of the other. So other museums started to actually want to work in this manner as well. There's always some sort of critical mass that I feel. It's like that question you said, how come all of a sudden everything seems to happen at the same time? But I think they just, yeah, it's that kind of critical mass. So I've ended up working with the British Museum, nearly every museum and thing. So this is actually a picture of me. They actually allowed me to actually photograph and recontextualize a lot of the historical sort of taonga. But my work, and I have been told this honestly, with museums has helped instigate new modes of interactions between artists and museum collections. I've been able to collaborate with academics, students, artists, members of the Polynesian community, form new networks with the arts and museum communities here in the UK, the USA, the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand. So it's a challenging relationship, but nevertheless a very important aspect of my practice, which I am still negotiating. This is a highly negotiated space. It is definitely not for the timid. And a lot of it is because of this, the construct of the museum as a colonial artifact itself. And in terms of this notion of ownership, in terms of a Western view of ownership, when we are trying to deal with them and work with concepts like kaitiakitanga, which is about guardianship. And guardianship comes with responsibilities and it's a lot more complex than just saying you own something. So so many museum collections around the world have lost their multiple voices, the moly, the life force, along with the intangible histories that reside in them. The collector is always there, descriptions of the materials and techniques are diligently noted, and mostly they are never to be seen. I call this conserved out of existence. So, and this is, they say, in an effort to preserve them for future generations. So it's like they deal with the past and they deal with the future, but it's like they're not willing to deal with the now, and we are the ones here now. So I feel like part of my job is to keep this dynamic relationship activated, sort of making museums and our cultural heritage relevant to the present and in the now. I mean, so what is my job, besides being the informants, the workshop leader, the critique, the researcher, the pain in the butt when you're asking for collections to be seen and to be handled, and sometimes a very unwanted guest demanding indigenous indices and epistemologies to be acknowledged. So I thought this is where maybe I would start to talk about some of the concepts that I employ in my artwork. So why do I say I am the museum? Why am I the museum? We have a whakatoke at home, says ka'au te whare, te whare ka'au. I am the house, the house is me. And this goes back to the Polynesian body, what have I got next, I'm sorry. So there's a few concepts that have just ingrained in me, which is why I come to these things. So the Polynesian body is the vessel of the ancestor, the house of the ancestor. When you look at the very first house that you were housed in, where do you think that is? It's a very special house. It's a very special house, the house of the people. And we take this concept and it flows right through the shelters that we stay in and everything. So the space where the genealogical matter comes together, binding the past with the present. So my body brings the ancestor into the now. So when I meet paunga, I activate space between the past and the present. The body collapses all this time and space, bringing them into the now. They live through me and I live through them, creating a living dynamic which is then taken out of the spatial confines of the box or the case, and in turn activating the moly, the spark of life. So there was always lots of talk with anthropologists, like all these, you know, these poor indigenous people, they think that their artifacts are living, you know. And it's really, you know, we're not saying they're gonna say, oh yeah, hi, please meet you, yeah, let's go down the pub. But through this collapsing of time and space through the genealogical matter, they live through us, we live through them, then they recirculate through the society again. So we are able to add new narratives, it's not what they were, it's what they can become. And what I said before, because we are the past, we are the present, we are the future. So it's some of these, and when you activate these spaces, they need to be sustained and maintained. Now this is the complex bit, this is the bit that is hard because, I mean, whether it's institutional policy, whether it's a local policy, whether it's a national government policy in terms of funding and what will be funded and what is art and what is artifact, all these things come into play. And even on that sort of level when you're developing projects, I'm sure a lot of you have found some of these things really hard where they're willing to give a lot of money for the artifact, but not for the community that is actually living and representing that community now. So a lot of my work is actually looking at policies and finding how we can acknowledge these really important roles that we all have. So what is this va I am talking about? I think I found a quote, because I know academics love quotes. And this is Albert Went, and he's one of our lack of better word tribal leaders. He's a great mentor, writer, he's Samoan. So va, the space between the space, the betweenness, not an empty space, not space that separates, but space that relates, that holds separate entities and things together in the unity and all, the space and that is context giving meaning to all things. So this is very much a Samoan space I'm coming from now. I'm being very ethnocentric here. A well-known Samoan expression is la tu le va. So cherish, nurture this space. The va, the relationships. This is crucial in communal cultures that value group unity and more than the individual person creature thing in terms of group, in terms of va relationships. So the ta va philosophy has hugely influenced my work and there's been vigorous debate going on in the last 10, 15 years within our own Polynesian, academic and cultural and artistic circles that are still developing and it has many applications. So this is the way I apply this particular concept and it's the way that I started to work within the museums because I'm personally interested in the rupture of the va relationship that was formed on first contact in the exchange of things. So much scholarship has been written about the rupture of the culture, the form and the function, but I feel the relationship with the culture and descendants attached to the collections has to be conserved as much as the physical object. So I call this concept va shon, get it? Whoa. So the future relationships, yeah, boom, boom, can build and grow with the taonga because it's the taonga that brings us together. So it's the collections that all bring us together and so this is the space, it creates a space that we all enter to and then it's up to us, the living, to how we too live, how we maintain and cherish the space. So I feel that the real art of my work is in the activation, so of course the acta va shon, of course, of the relationship with me, the taonga re-invigorating and reviving the collections through the body, allowing the works to go out and be ingested outside the confines of the museum space or enclosure. So I had another poem I wanted to share with you actually. Oh, this is a Poetoku Manawa. I don't think I'll give you much context, you can come and ask me afterwards what he is. So I met him and it is gendered, it is a hymn. I met him in some collections in UCL, he was lying down, things like we asked him to be stored lying up because in fact that is not a good state for him to be in in terms of this activating again. And he was used in an exhibition and I saw that he had holes in his ears and I knew that once he would have had many great adornments. So I actually asked if I could re-adorn him. So I actually made him these beautiful taaringa. And some bits in here might explain that in terms of activating the space, this personal space between me and this Poetoku Manawa. So this is called a Poetoku Manawa bypass. Mate Manawa, a heart attack, discovery, recovery, pulse somewhat faint but still has a beat. Been out of circulation for a while, hoarded now in storage to be used as referential data for a past mankind. Somewhere there is a house with no support, no arms, no legs, no eyes, no head, no threshold for you to enter, no stomach, no ribs, no backbone, no steps to heaven, no albatross, tears, no birds of a feather, genealogically muted, paralyzed, archived, institutionalized, a trophy. What is left is a wooden heart pumping parched blood straight onto the floor, all soaked up with some acid-free tissue, some curatorial discourse, the intangible chattels left to the side. We are face-to-face, my nose pressed against yours, Hongi Mai, we breathe in the ages. I smell violence. Where are your mountains, your waters, your people? What was your name? Your tribal affiliations. Who was the man that carved you? I smell decimation. Where is your topknot? Did they leave it behind with your other adorments or did it just get lost along the way? And in whose god's name cut off your penis? I smell animation. You still have your deep grooves aface, etched with the land, stout body, arched back, three-pronged grass, territorial stance, tattooed ass. I bring you gifts of aute, white will attract the gods, rocura, treasured by the chiefs, power, so you can hide in the sea. Mako, a valuable trade item for the other side, engendered tenderness. Reactivate, resuscitate, defibrillate, revive alive thrife. Your beat goes on. Listen, we will sing to you. We will call to you. Our hearts will beat for you on behalf of you. Moe, moe, ra, rangatira, ka hoki mae ano. Rest well. We'll be there to greet you again and again keep that heart pumping. So when I meet these taonga, I mean, sometimes it is so profound. You know, some things really speak to you. I really, and it's not everything that I find has some sort of violence in it. A lot of things, but not everything. A lot of our first trade was based on exchange. So we have a very different culture to, to say Africa and Egypt and Greece where there's a lot of looting and pirating going on. And because our, but I suppose in terms of once that tribal art market came, these were very, very desirable objects and they came as commodity. So this guy here, Paetoko Manawa, you will find in the heart, he is the heart of the ancestral house. So even our houses are embodiments of all this genealogical matter. So when you see a Māori meeting house, the ancestor is up high, the arms are out ready to embrace you, the legs, these eyes, his mouth. You walk inside these. You walk in through the threshold. You walk in through that creative space through the whare tangata. And you will find the Paetoko Manawa and he has usually a big, he holds up the house basically. And then you have the rafters, you have the ribs and then you have the backbone and a lot of the, what are that, basically ancestral carvings that represent your genealogy. So you always have a place. You're Turanga Waiwai where your feet stand firm. You are literally genealogically connected to these whare. So sometimes when I meet guys like this, it's incredible. You can literally see the saw marks. Somebody literally came in. Okay, perfect objects, not even that big can fit in a case and be sent away, bought and sold. So this guy ends up, he lives in the UCL teaching collection. So actually he's got a pretty active life. He's sort of, lots of students kind of hang out with him. But I mean, which is why I actually asked for him to be stored standing up because it just wasn't fair for him to be in such a dormant state with everything going on around him. Don't you hate that when you seem to bed and there's a party going on? So anyway, this is sort of some of the interventions that I do. Like the actual fact that they let me re-hidorn him was amazing. And then I saw that he was then re-exhibited, popular guy, because aesthetically he's very pleasing. So he was then re-exhibited, but I noticed that they did not actually mention these new dormants. And this was at a body dormant exhibition, a body, so they were just, but I thought they've missed a trick because body dormant is not just about the tattoos. It's not just about his ta moko, but if they had really been paying attention, they would have actually understood that his new dormants had brought him back into this world, into this living world, into the now. So I write, lie, no actually I emailed them. But I just pointed out that actually, that maybe it would have been good to acknowledge, and maybe I did such a good job on his earrings. They are very, very traditional. I use traditional materials, traditional techniques. So maybe they didn't realize that there was a modding living hand at play. Or maybe it was just that because it's just some other crafty stuff that some woman did, I don't know, any way I wrote to them. And this started up a relationship with this museum called the Hornyman Museum, which is where I actually wrote that poem, Four Potokku Manawa. And then when he went back to bed, when they opened the cabinets, I serenaded him basically, and I go visit him quite a bit. So that's probably a good example of how I work. Now how much time have I got? Five minutes? Okay, we're gonna race through Dhalam. So this is how I end up at places like Dhalam. It's an interesting place. I mean, I kind of like the fact that they actually have, they've got Africa, Oceania, and Asia, very, very normal combination. But then they have Europa. So I was like, oh wow, they're actually even, because usually we all get put in the folky bit, you know? So I was like, oh well, at least they folked them own selves. Incredible collections. And for me to see the size of the Pacific galleries, but it took my breath away. In England, we usually relegated honestly to a little corner like that. Okay, there's Pacific. We're like one third of the Earth's surface. And we get like a corner. And again, a lot of it's to do with value and commodity and, you know, with an antiquity, you know? Like, so it's very hard to, when you know England alone has over one million oceanic artifacts. And most museums, they only show 2% of their total collections and then shrink that even more to what we get. And so I was really excited. These waka, these canoes, I mean, as I said, before the birth of Christ, our people, I mean, not this particular one, they're much bigger, but they were traversing this ocean. And normal galleries, more colonial booty, I call it, the booty, sort of. I mean, and a lot of this is the same old, same old. You get this in every museum. You get the carvings, you get the tikis, you get the, so it is like a well-trodden thing. I often go back into the stores. I'm very interested in photographs because this is a lot of how our people are presented. This is a lot of how the European world first met the Polynesian body. So the Polynesian body has been totally constructed by the West. And even though the natural state of our young Taupo here is completely normal in our culture, it was highly exoticized by the West. And a lot of us call this ethno-porn. And that's how, you know, you could get away in the name of science by having a whole lot of titties, you know, in your room. So this is how I usually think. So storage, we'll actually have a look at techniques. Dalin was amazing. I learned two new techniques in terms of my craft. So these collections are actively teaching me. And then I was given a studio and I was talking before because the Biennale was going to be at the end of my, so I had a one month residency and I was expected within two and a half weeks to produce a something, a dance, a performance, actually. But I keep, actually I said, no, I've actually, I've had enough of this very, very clumsy word, performance and dance because I've come here to activate this space. I've come here to open up the space between me and my cultural treasures and also the German colonial history that it was trying to hide. So in the galleries, there was photographs, amazing photographs of New Zealand raising the New Zealand flag after the Germans had left. So the Germans had a very short, but actually very, they were very popular in terms of the historical narrative of the colonial history of Samoa. But they left in 1914, so they had something else to do. And that's basically England rung up, well, Talexed or whatever they did, and asked New Zealand to go and take over Samoa. We have got very good harbours, so they wanted those harbours. It was actually very stishti, I can't say it, you know what I mean. So anyway, can you see the eagle and the coconut thing? So that was the flag, that they'd even designed us a flag. You know, they were gonna go there. So I actually found the photos of the German flag being raised in Samoa because it's just really intrigued me that the absence of their own history, I mean, I know the weight of the war and the narratives that's embedded in that is incredibly heavy and that it's still being dealt with now, let alone all of a sudden you're going, oh, well, guess what, you guys have got a colonial history too. So I know it's a lot. So this is where art can actually bridge these gaps. Some of these are very hard things to talk about. So anyway, what you see over there is just basically it was my working journal. But I wanted to actually just, I was put people in who are living now. And that's why some of the questions I asked, what is your name? Where are you from? Who carved you? These are really important to be your taonga, otherwise you really are just an artifact. And also, I mean, we highly decorated people and we make beautiful things that contain the mana, the dignity of what the words are gonna say. So I made a costume. And I also met this beautiful young lady Jasmine here in Fiji. She said that she lived in Germany and I invited her to actually collaborate with me. So these are just some of the images of this activation. So I am literally introducing myself to the museum collections. I'm telling them who I am, who my mountains are, who my waters are. So these are really important rituals for us. You don't just walk in somebody's house and don't tell them who you are. So there's a lot of responsibilities that come with our cultural heritage and the practice in how this is enacted in these public spaces. Because this was a very public. So Jasmine responded to the Hawaiian collections. I don't know why people are scared of me. This was a eureka moment actually. This is when we got to re-adorn one of the atua. Now I had some very long talks to this atua too. And also to the conservators. But they actually, even though they were very uncomfortable, they knew that physically, that this could not damage the artifact. But also now I have to take responsibility that I have activated this atua. So then what are my responsibilities in terms of sustaining and maintaining this relationship to this and honoring this activation? So these are some of the things I wrestle with in terms of when I am working with museum collections. It was, yeah, it was amazing. Everybody followed us. And I went back down to the thing and I ended up taking off all my clothes and making the, actually what I was wearing into an artifact itself. Now I wasn't doing this because I thought, that I am just like so sexy that, you know. But I'm really sort of looking at them going, there's about 15 pictures of naked woman in your museum. Okay, what's it like when a real one's standing there? You know, with fatty birds and breast-fed breasts, you know, it's not the size 10 dusky maiden that sells you a holiday, you know. And what is this? And also in my culture, my tatau, my markings, are considered clothing, so I'm not naked. But I, and actually I've just finished off with this poem that I wrote, actually, which sums it up really, so, and that's where I'll finish. So, because actually even when I was developing this activation, I knew that there would be certain readings and it's to be expected, you know, a lot of people don't have that much contact with this living sort of thing. So this is anyway sums it all up to me and I'll finish there. In the poems called Glass Walls and Dark Seas. In the dark, in the sea, a walker, it's a canoe, is flying over the water, surging through white noise, lilting heavy with the wind. I am the dark, the long night, the void. I am unlimited potential, untethered, volatile, as deep as I am long. I will envelop you, imbibe you, bind you, lash you to the prowl of that canoe. Do not stare at the sun, do not stare at the chiefs, stare at me. I am the night, soaking up the light, taking it for my lover, devouring it, fucking it. Yet I bear no cloth, I have no worm, just the entrails of Te Por washed in the sea. For gods will follow, they won't touch and nor will you. I am tapu, unbound, untouchable. Only food will clear the way, prepare your feast. Stare as much as you want. These bare breasts are not for you. I am not here to provoke your desire, but to render you noir as you walk amongst my gods. My naked body clothed for ceremonial exposure. Look, but don't touch where you can't. They have built a wall, it is made of glass, containing the past. Thank you. Thank you, that was, oops, sorry. Thank you, that was amazing. Thank you. Would anybody like to ask any questions? I can pass the mic. Hi, thanks for that. It was really inspiring. My research is about the dichotomy, the sort of enforced by UNESCO on heritage between nature and culture, and I'm really interested in what, if you've got any thoughts around the difference between natural heritage, or not difference between natural heritage and cultural heritage. Well, that's really interesting because actually it's highly contentious in the islands. Just for example, I have a friend, very good friend of mine's from Raiatia, which is a sacred hub. It was like our Oxford University in the middle of Tahiti. And UNESCO have been sniffing around it, wanting it to make it a heritage site. And it's just hugely problematic because it's in that terms of what is it they are wanting to conserve. And it's very different to what the locals are wanting to preserve. And in terms of the attention that it brings in terms of a world site, and then the tourists come, and then they haven't got the infrastructure for that, so it brings off this whole new set of issues. Now, I've forgotten who named the lady who spoke yesterday about the UNESCO. Brita, Brita. Brita, Brita summed it up. I was like, boom, should go find Brita. Because, and again, it's not acknowledging the fact that indigenous people have ontologies and epistemologies of our own. They're relegated to really nice world views. But they're not allowing us to frame what is important to us, and how it's to be implemented. And it causes a lot of tension within the communities. A lot of times these are small communities that don't have the infrastructure to deal. They're more interested in building roads. And they want that place. And also it brings out a lot of painful memories for them in terms of where they are now as people. There's a lot of problematic histories in that space. I mean, it was built on the dead. It's really, it's, you know, and they want to turn it into some nice heritage site, clean up all the histories so that it's preserved forever. So you can't touch it, so you can't go and have the rituals that are happening now there. So it's, yeah, it's gonna be a long road. Because again, it's still, you know, the privilege of the Western construct is put on top of instead of creating these balanced spaces. And museums have the opportunity to do that. But, you know, we look at the Dalam at the moment. You know, and I've heard so many amazing discourses on that. You know, you've got this Prussian castle with this King Frederick who actually started the colonial sort of history of Samoa too. So, and then so that building was, it's got layers of histories and who gets absented and, you know, and then it became, got bombed and then it became this site for a lot of the communists sort of speech. And now they want to put this great big old, you know, imperial thing back on top of it. And then they want to stick indigenous people in there. So it's, and it's kind of, I mean, in a way it's kind of colonial karma because he kind of came and visited us. But now we can kind of go hang out in his house. But it's, but I think the process is though, some of those curators came to New Zealand, you know, to talk, but at us, not with us, you know, and they go to other imperial sites, the Auckland Museum, the National Museum. So they're still not really grasping that this is an incredible opportunity to reframe the museum space and explore the living dynamic and acknowledge these really important relationships. Because as I said, I feel if the relationship with between the living communities is ignored and you've got tens of thousands of their cultural artifacts, their taonga, their treasures, then that's a crime. So, and yeah, and how do we rebalance that? You know, as an artist, you know, I've just got this like through, you know, through my little stone in the pond. You know, but we do need to get this critical mess and I think that's where the academics are really important, but I'm not seeing much of that coming through the academics. They're just sticking to the same old, same old discourses and paradigms. I don't know, we just seem to be going around in circles unless we really feel that we want to challenge the power base, you know, maybe lose some jobs. I mean, it's scary. You know, if you stick your neck out, it's scary. You might not have a job tomorrow. It's really hard. So I probably haven't answered your question, but yeah. That's kind of what I was going to ask. Thank you, thank you. Are there any other questions? You can take one more and then have a dinner break. No, I talked you guys out. Thank you so much for lending me your ears. Thank you very, very much.