As a science-fiction writer and fan, I was excited to discover that The Dark Current, Angela Tiatia’s moving-image installation, is the second work in a trilogy. The trilogy form works well in science-fiction and fantasy genres, providing room to build intricate worlds and lore, and to bend and travel through time.
For many Indigenous Pacific peoples, including Sāmoan, Fijian, Tongan, Hawaiian and Māori, time is non-linear. As Epeli Hau‘ofa writes, time is ecological and circular; it fits with the regular planetary cycles and does not exist independently of our natural surroundings.[01] In this conception of circular time, we sit in the present with the past located ahead of us leading into the future, which is behind. The past is always right there in front of our eyes in land, sea and sky. In the Pasifika science of celestial navigation, we sit in a waka in the present and travel across thousands of miles of ocean safely and efficiently, using nothing but the ancestral knowledge of the past and clues provided by nature to find land far below the distant horizon.
Structured in three distinct parts focusing on past, present and future, The Dark Current is a Pasifikafuturist rendition of time, space, culture, history and dystopia, a speculative wayfinding journey moving from Sāmoa, to Ra‘iātea, to the artist’s studio, to outer space. It explores Tiatia’s matrilineal whakapapa to Sāmoa, the strength of Pasifika femininity, the impact of social media in the present day, and a hyperreal vision of the future where Pasifika peoples have built a joyous life on the debris of capitalist colonialism. This speculative turn in Tiatia’s practice, towards constructed images of Pasifika futurity, is grounded in Pacific time imaginaries and our timeless relationship to Papatūānuku (Earth Mother), Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean) and Ranginui (Sky Father). The work is multi-layered and bears multiple viewings, each turn revealing different meanings and nuance. Like a book you read over and over.
Directly in front of Tiatia, in her own recent past, is the unexpected passing of her mother. The Dark Current is an homage, a love letter, to Tiatia’s mother, and all other Pasifika women of her generation who journeyed from their home islands in the 1950s and 60s to live and work in New Zealand, Australia and America. The ‘past’ of the story begins on a romanticised image of Pacific femininity, with an elegant young woman lying supine on a pink-carpeted slab. Tiatia likens this image to a promotional video luring Pasifika women of her mother’s generation to another life in a different land. The camera hovers above the woman. Her dress is a punchy, bold shade of deep pink, a magenta with black undertones, that pops against the dark water as it rushes in and rises around the woman’s body. Despite the discombobulating flood swirling around her, she remains calm as she moves her arms through the water in graceful gestures reminiscent of Sāmoan siva and Hawaiian hula. She is almost becoming one with the sea.
Staying with the past, we are transported to the stone marae complex at Taputapuātea on the island of Ra‘iātea, in the Society Islands of French Polynesia, the camera looking down upon the site as it did upon the woman’s body, in the manner of the eye of god, all seeing, all knowing. The site is central to Polynesian mythology and religion, and to technologies of Pacific oceanic voyaging. In the metaphysical sense, Ra‘iātea is considered a font of learning and knowledge, especially knowledge handed down by gods and spirit-ancestors. Rituals and ceremonial practices developed at Taputapuātea link it both physically and spiritually with marae throughout the Pacific. One such tradition is the use of a stone from Taputapuātea as the foundation for new marae on other islands. In Māori belief, soil from Taputapuātea was brought on the Tainui waka and placed at its landing spot at Kāwhia. A Māori whakataukī, or proverb, captures this event: E kore au e ngaro, he kākano i ruia mai i Rangiātea – I shall never be lost, I am a seed sown from Rangiātea.
The two images, of the woman on the pink platform and the ātea at Ra‘iātea, overlay each other in a double exposure. The resulting effect speaks once more to the cyclical nature of time in Pasifika cultures and provides a powerful rendition of the oneness of the ancestors with the strength of Pacific women, whose adventurous journeys required a courageous passage across the vast Pacific Ocean.
A pearl is placed at the corner of the woman’s eye. This was the first image that came to Tiatia in the creation of the project. It is the seed from which the piece grew, an image of female Pasifika strength and beauty formed around an irritant, like sand in an oyster shell. In the present, the water is no longer rushing and free flowing, but stagnant. Pasifika women move through the still water in choreographed dance, and two graceful hands with acrylic fingernails catch fire when they meet. The image references the Māori pūrākau, or legend, of Mahuika, who was tricked by Māui into giving him the gift of fire, handing her fingernails of fire to him one by one. It is also a Pasifika reimagining of Michelangelo’s famous painting The Creation of Man.
We study the past and we know how Western history has impacted us. We are aware of and interested in the modalities of being Pacific and the mana that we hold. The reworking of European mythologies through a Pasifika lens reverses the romanticised colonial adventure story of encounter with Indigenous peoples into the colonisee’s version of destructive contact with an alien force. Colonial structures took away the foundations of our identity—language, stories, beliefs. Our mothers held these knowledge systems despite being told that they were unnecessary for our success in the Western world, and now we reclaim them. The present ends with a break in the fourth wall. The crane-mounted camera tracks above, capturing dancers and crew on set, as the dancers exit the pool by a small ladder. This dramatic device confounds the audience’s expectation of storytelling narrative. Rather than continuing a slick, hyper-immersive, world-building experience, the story breaks into the disorganised, untidy, chaotic world behind the scenes on a film set. The work takes a moment to breathe and ground itself, showing the collaborative relationships built in the vā between cast, crew and artist. Honouring these artistic connections and respecting the vā is a particularly Pacific mode of filmmaking. In the process, the Western gaze is rejected, and the artifice and deception that are inherent to making art are exposed.
From the realist space of production, Tiatia moves us into a hyperreal, virtual space made from scanned images that are animated, manipulated and repeated using 3D gaming software. Women dance on a platform suspended in space with an enormous moon filling the background. Huge, tiered structures of sculpted-ice fruit and shells, reminiscent of colonial fountains, tower over the detritus of capitalism—oil cans, old tyres, car wrecks and pink plastic scallop- shell swimming pools. These items appeared filled with flowers and shell necklaces, and gushing with water, in The Pearl, the first work in the trilogy.
The water in this universe is frozen, contained. Women dance unrestrained, unlike the woman in the magenta dress lying on a platform in the first act, whose body swirls in rushing water. It is doubtful our mothers knew the full extent of what was waiting for them when they journeyed across the Pacific Ocean to the promise of a better life. Their adventurous spirits were fuelled by a vision of a gleaming future for their children. They paid a high cost, facing racism, hardship and sacrifice. Working in the fields and factories, and cleaning corporate buildings. We, the children of those adventurous women, are the beneficiaries of their brave choices, imbued with both Pasifika and Western universes. But we must work hard to retain language, culture and identity.
Set against narrative techniques that Western literature may consider ‘innovative’, Pacific cosmology might appear to pre-empt science-fiction notions such as the novum, or strange newness. But the complexities of whakapapa and relationships between reanga, or generations, over time are built into a Pacific world view that persists despite the incursions of colonialism. The Dark Current is a Pasifika assertion that strange newness is not new to us. We are well acquainted with the science-fiction trope of the arrival of the aliens who want to take over. The trope turns back on itself in speculative imagery that resonates with the spirit of endurance. We now stand where our mothers once stood, holding the gift of their strength within us. We find power in our relationships with each other in the chaos of the present. We look with a weather eye to the future, where we will dance on the vestiges of the past in shining magenta.
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