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Project Title: The Calling
It is the water that brought us to our land. Our old people to our land.
It is the water that brought ‘them’ to our land, their new land.
It is the water that falls from our eyes at all that separates us today, from the way we were.
It is the water that continues to call us back to our old peoples thinking.
The calling.
Melanesian marking was always a womans practice. In the past the water would take the men, they would travel and move, fishing and gathering food along the coast for weeks on end, often perilous journeys. Women would stay to build gardens, construct and maintain relationships and family networks. Women were the backbone of our societies. Their strength and their connections and their familial wealth were displayed upon their skin. Mothers to daughters, mothers to daughters continued this visual language so that even when the sea would separate us (through marriage) the marks would always connect and identify us to our land, to our people.
Auckland-based Fijian curator Ema Tavola has invited me to devise a new work for the exhibition, A Maternal Lens that will be staged as part of the 4th International Biennial of Casablanca, Morocco from October 2018. I intend to present the act and practice of Melanesian tatu as a live, performative contribution to the exhibition, alongside a suite of video works / short films that will represent the contexts and movement of my tatu / marking practice from Papua New Guinea, to the diaspora, and to Casablanca. I aim to share the culture, time and space that surrounds our marks, and that no matter the geography, the marks ground us and respond to a ‘calling’ to reconnect with our people and our land.
This request for funding centres around the importance of the participation of my daughter, Vasa Gray, as an essential part of my work, and the significance of the soundscape of my practice and my culture. In order to mark skin, I require a ‘stretcher’ – someone who holds the skin and wipes away excess fluids, sometimes buffers me and the person being marked, and assists in the process of working with the human form. The role is essential, and it is the foundation to understanding the process of tatu. I have been teaching my daughter Vasa to stretch for me since she was 11 years old; she has a natural ability, a high level of patience and strong grounding in her commitment to the art form and it’s cultural symbolism. At the age of 15, she is already well on her way to taking up the tools to be a proficient mark maker by her young adulthood.
As part of A Maternal Lens, it is more relevant than ever to include Vasa Gray as part of my ‘production costs’ for this exhibition. Everyone we mark together is literally a moment of maternal cultural transmission in action. She will learn a lot being in a new and potentially challenging environment, and the experience will give her significant grounding in her identity as a Papua New Guinean / Samoan / Māori young woman.
Together with Vasa, we will have the capacity to mark four to five participants during the first week of the Biennial which will fulfil an important participatory element of Ema’s curatorial vision for the project. The environment we create and the process of marking within the exhibition space will be filmed, and as an addition to the space, once we leave to return home, the footage will be added as a third channel / short film, to connect the marks made in Papua New Guinea, Australia and New Zealand to Morocco, and the Biennial.
To connect the three videos / short films, I will collaborate with David Bridie, a foremost expert of Melanesian music and producer for Wantok Musik Foundation (Australia). He will score the video works and reference the songs and sounds of Papua New Guinea to locate the practice of tatu within the land, culture and people that it originates from. David’s production quality is highly regarded; his soundscape will add real depth and mana to the videos, the space and the viewer experience.
I intend to create an open and light space for the tatu practice to sit within, to dispel common myths of Melanesian historical pasts of dark huts and caves. My video works will loosely represent the concept of past, present and future as a circular constant.
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