Abstract:
This project attempts to engage in a “practice-led-research [sic]” (Nelson 37) process to create collaborative art works that focus on the particulars of ngā puia o Ihumātao, namely Maungataketake, Ōtuataua, Waitomokia and the wāhi tapu (sacred) Te Puketaapapatanga a Hape. The foundation of this research is to practically engage with specific Kaupapa Māori Practices that Linda Smith has identified, through a kanohi ki te kanohi (face-to-face) “conversational” (Taiaroa, sec 2) consultation process with mana whenua of Ihumātao (Māori with traditional custodial authority for Ihumātao), Te Wai-ō-Hua. This project was initiated as a solidarity attempt with Walter Mignolo’s decolonial proviso of “confronting and delinking from…the colonial matrix of power” (xxvii). In support of my intent, as tauiwi (non-Māori), I provide links between L. Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies and the “hyphen between colonizer-indigene” (473), which Kuni Kaa Jenkins (Ngāti Porou) and Alison Jones (Pākehā) identify as a creative coming together in the hyphen area between colonizer and indigene. The dynamic of this hyphen space is further reflected on through the writing of Cassandra Barnett (Ngāti Raukawa). This research seeks to emphasise the contextual framework that Aotearoa provides through a focus on regionally located [Moana Pacific] references from what Martin Nakata (Torres Strait Islander, Japanese) calls an “Indigenous standpoint” (Nakata 40). He champions “[s]tandpoint theory” (40) specifically, which is an “Indigenous standpoint as a theoretical position that might be useful” (ibid.). I would further add, with help from Clare Land (European Australian), that “gendered oppression intersects with race” (chap. 3) and that “intersectionality is even more complex, contingent and shifting when its workings within and between distinct social worlds are brought into view” (ibid.). Hence this project focuses on the voices of wāhine (women), along with regionally situated [Moana Pacific] and/or “Indigenous standpoint[s]” (Nakata 40), with a conscientious move away from canonized western perspectives; in so far as the west “is a project, not a place” (Glissant 2). “[E]xperience-centered” (Butt 30) research approaches inform site-situated performances that focus on a “view from a body” (Haraway 196) and Manulani Aluli-Meyer’s (Fifth daughter of Emma Aluli and Harry Meyer, Manulani grew up on the shores of Kailua beach on the island of O‘ahu.) notion that the body is the “central space” (12) of knowing. Such approaches also align with Miwon Kwon’s (Korean-American) contestation that a particular engagement with site-specificity potentially operates the “rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism” (3); which claims to create socially engaged work, yet problematically plonks art-in-public-places. Kwon calls for artists to be critical of spatial politics and to “advance an altogether different notion of a site as predominantly an ‘intertextually’ coordinated, multiply-located, discursive field of operation [sic]” (30). Treatment of the term site-situated throughout this written document indicates my concurrence with Kwon’s analysis, with no plans to plonk, plop or drop artwork on what is already a place full of meaning. Performances for this project are attempted in what fellow DocFA candidate Roman Mitch (Ngā puhi) conversationally names a ‘peer-to-peer’ (colleague to colleague) format. Collaborative arrangements favor teamwork and result in joint responses where the lines between “single collective authorship” (Mata Aho, par. 1) and equitable peer-to-peer autonomy are blurred, in order to test the creative potential of multiply situated perspectives. Key art collectives including Mata Aho, FAFSWAG, Local Time, Tufala Meri, Oceania Interrupted and D.A.N.C.E. Art Club inspire this interdisciplinary work. Maria Lind (Swedish) explains the interdisciplinary principle as “another contemporary way of ‘coming together’ and ‘working together’… old borders are transgressed and different disciplines meet and, at best, fertilize each other” (56). I focus on the similarly termed “meeting point” (Vincent et al. 13), which is described by Australian based Eve Vincent, Timothy Neale and Crystal McKinnon as an “interdisciplinary space” (ibid.) that functions as a “transactional site and a transactional act” (11). The aspirational “meeting point” (13) of this creative project embraces enduring reciprocal relationships so as to test their transformative potential to advocate for the protection of ngā puia o Ihumātao. I anticipate that this activity will culminate in a walking protest event on Karangahape Road entitled Te Karanga a Hape Hīkoi. To use the words of Édouard Glissant “cultural activism must lead to political activism, if only to bring to fruition the unification of those implicit or explicit areas of resistance” (253).