FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI / KOOZ Taloi, Mere and Amer: can I ask you to begin by introducing yourselves?

MERE NAILATIKAU Sure. I'm Mere Nailatikau; I’m Amer's co-producer. We met when they were living in Suva, Fiji, where I'm based. My background is in communications; we started off in audio storytelling together and it has brought us here, over many years, to work on Oceanic Refractions. It's lovely to meet with you, Taloi.

AMER KANNGIESERI'm Amer Kanngieser; I’m a geographer and a sound artist based in the Centre for Geohumanities at Royal Holloway University of London. As Mere said, I have spent time in Fiji — and across the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Nauru and Papua New Guinea — speaking with many queer and transgender people, women and elders. Mere and I have been working together since 2018 on radio and sound art works, and now on the art installation Oceanic Refractions with filmmakers Laisiasa Dave Lavaki and Tumeli Tuqota, also from Fiji, and with sound artist Joseph Kamaru (KMRU). It's great, Taloi, to be in conversation with you.

TALOI HAVINI Great to meet you both, Mere and Amer. My name is Taloi Havini. I’m speaking from Brisbane, and working between Brisbane and Bougainville. I’ve been working, this year and last year, with two artists — Latai Taumoepeau and Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta — on Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania, talking about their artworks within the framework of Oceania and broader stories from the South Pacific region.

KOOZ Thinking about knowledge — its production and transmission — can you talk about your reciprocal practices in relation to the Pacific Islands; also considering how these sit within the context of Western or conventional institutions of knowledge and culture?

MN Since Amer and I started working together, it’s really been about delving into oral and communal storytelling, which is a conveyance of knowledge — one that comes quite naturally, particularly for Fijians and, I imagine, other Pacific cultures as well. Initially that spoke to me: not just in terms of orality but also in the acknowledgement of people as vessels for knowledge, and of [storytelling] being the first or primary source when it comes to the preservation of knowledge, the preservation of people, of ancestry, or family and networks. That was striking; this form of knowledge might not be something you can capture as a photograph or a recording, but it can stimulate so much discussion, so many more questions.

AK Part of the work that we've been doing is based on recorded testimonies, field recordings and long-term collaborations with people, through interviews, workshops and different practices of conversation. We have been guided by many of the elders that we've been working with in Kiribati, Fiji and in Papua New Guinea. They taught us a lot about the importance of sound and silence, which has really been the focus of Oceanic Refractions. We draw from Professor Unaisi Nabobo-Baba, who features in Oceanic Refractions as well as our radio series Listening Across Fault Lines commissioned by Deutschland Radio; she describes silence as a pedagogy of deep engagement. That's been very important to us, in thinking about knowledge: what place does silence have, in the kinds of stories that we are conveying?

KOOZ Taloi, you too work within cultural spaces, to re-center and shift their narratives. How does your work respond to the predominant forms of ways of looking at Oceania from the Western perspective?

TH Both Mere and Amer have provided excellent context on the current legacies of this idea around your question, in terms of the clash between Western and non-western forms of knowledge production; particularly for me, concerning art history. I’m also thinking about this knowledge in scientific modes, recalling the methods by which Indigenous peoples were written into history by the west.

We are in a time where Indigenous peoples are authors — not the sole subject of knowledge. I still think there are fundamental differences. Western perspectives clash with Indigenous peoples’ relationship with time and space. Western science that founded studies on race have since been phased out, yet we are still living in the wake of these assumptions. Shifting this narrative remains a challenge today over our clash in value-systems.

Knowledge can be embodied. Knowledge can be passed down; it can be non-literal and just as valuable. As an artist and someone who works with institutions around cultural material, I often think of time as being the major clash between our cultures and, as Amer and Mere referenced above, two esteemed Oceanian authors in countering these settler-colonial perspectives with their own.

KOOZ Mere and Amer, to understand the Oceanic Refractions project, I want to ask more about the kinds of voices and testimonies — both human voices, but also planetary voices — that you include.

MN Well, it really resonated with me, Taloi, when you spoke about the clash that's still happening in terms of acknowledging the very different values and carrying different forms of knowledge. One example being this notion of time, as you'll hear in Nabobo-Baba’s testimony, speaking of time in terms of interconnectivity with one another, and time being a form of interconnection, rather than a linear, sequential way to view the world, to construct knowledge and to share knowledge.

Silence is a space for the acknowledgement of that interconnectivity, even from the very physical representation of the space, when we were looking at ways of representing or conveying these testimonies. I recall how we arrived at this notion of a circular space for our installation. For us, that meant paying homage to the circular way in which interactions happen, particularly in Fiji. For example, there is this notion of a circular economy: a circular form, not of accumulation, but of something given and received. Coming from my background in communications, there's often this notion of communication being a one-to-one or a one-to-many dynamic — whereas when looking at knowledge production, it can often be a many-to-many experience, rather than being limited to those sequential notions. That definitely resonates in our work, and something that we do our best to embody through the physical installation space.

AK There's a really beautiful quote we have in Oceanic Refractions from the late Teweiariki Teaero, an i-Kiribati poet, scholar and artist. He told us about the i-Kiribati term “te aba” — the same word is used for land as for people. When one thinks about the voices and testimonies of people and land, it's not separable in the same way that it is in Anglo-European culture — which comes from histories of separation between humans and nature, which lay the foundation for ecocide The elders that we spoke to, particularly Simione Sevudredre, who is iTaukei Fijian, talked about the importance of listening to land and to place as much as listening to people. There is no hierarchy of relation in which people are at the top. As Unaisi Nabobo-Baba says, in Fijian, it’s what is called Vanua; it's all interconnected and entirely relational.

In the work that Mere and I do — for instance, in the field recordings that we use — we've been guided by the elders we speak with on how to seek consent from land and from place, as well as from people. Those recordings are part of the testimonies. You can't take people out of the environments that they're in. They have to be held together respectfully. This is more than a theoretical or abstracted conception of interdependence; it is interdependence as the foundation of everything that we do.

KOOZ As a spatial thinker, it’s exciting to think about this mode of knowledge transmission — the many to many, which unfolds within the physical space of the installation. I would reflect on the terms you use to define the project: what is ‘refraction’ in relation to knowledge, and this idea of the many-to-many?

MN That's an interesting question, and one to which we keep circling back. Thinking back on testimonies that we had the privilege to gather — and Teweiariki spoke about this so well — there is this sense of not only ecocide, but also the loss of knowledge; the entangled potential for the loss of knowledge. This harks back to one's initial sources of knowledge, whether that's traditional knowledge, indigenous knowledge, or knowledge of place. He spoke a lot about this constructed dependence on new forms of knowledge when we ourselves, as Pacific people, have tried and tested scientific knowledge that we've built, developed and shared over millennia. That's something that we did our best to acknowledge in that space; the idea that different people will hold a piece or a thread of that knowledge. Perhaps it gets refracted down through the years, in what we're able to pass on through generations. That's certainly one sense of it.

In representing this spatially, we were very clear about trying to convey those voices and testimonies in as real a form as possible, without wanting people to change the way they speak; to respect the fragmented speech, the incomplete sentences, the distinct accents, for instance. People tend to want information conveyed in ways that are more comfortable. But we believe that this is about sitting with the discomfort of straining to hear; to make sense of snippets of conversations and ends of discussions; to sit with the interruptions or the tensions, to strain your ear towards a different accent and to make the effort to understand. Because so often, it's indigenous and Pacific peoples who are the ones straining to understand settler colonial ideas or messaging. This was an opportunity to flip that on its head. That was at least one of the ways in which we tried to embody this aspect of refractions in our work.

Finally — again, it was an elder in the Duke of York Islands in Papua New Guinea, Philip Tacom, who spoke about this — there is an importance of understanding the language of nature. Being able to speak to trees, for instance, and being able to embody that language — not as being separate from nature, but as being, part of it. That too speaks to the refracted ways in which that knowledge is being conveyed, by which it is able to survive. That encapsulates the way that we tried to convey the work, both in the spatial way that the installation is represented, and also in our ongoing collaborations and relationships.

AKThe name for the work and the idea of refractions came from one of our collaborators, Zoe Todd. Zoe is a Métis philosopher who works on fish philosophy; they talk about the ways that fish listen with their entire being, their lateral line. Their work is influential in practising an openness to perspectival shifts, to truths that bend depending on where you are positioned. And how do we sit, as Mere was saying, with the uncapturable meaning in what people experience and say; what is unsaid but maybe inferred; what is held in stories that don't get told or told only to certain people, or in certain ways.

In our collaboration with sound artist, KMRU, we were playing on the edges of audibility constantly. The first installation was commissioned as the feature exhibition for CTM x transmediale, who were very generous partners for the work. It was envisioned for the Kuppelhalle in Berlin, which is an old crematorium, a high, domed building. The way the sound moved in the space was very resonant and this lent itself to our sound design. An audience member commented to us that they couldn't quite catch what was said and that was the point of the composition. Because when we listen, sometimes we don't hear everything, and sometimes not everything is for us to hear. We did provide transcripts for accessibility, but many also chose not to use them. With the sound also, we were interrupting this common trope of storytelling about the Pacific that involves straightforward narratives, which do not reflect the realities of people's inherently complex lives and histories.

In terms of the physical space of the artistic installation and transmitting knowledge, the architecture of the Kuppelhalle combined with its historical significance, which was especially relevant given Germany’s colonial violence in Oceania, meant we could experiment with how to bring these different legacies and environments together. We worked with Space Forms fabrication and Frameworks projections, as well as DB Audio to make the work as immersive and dynamic as possible, with a variety of circular screens as well as ceiling projections, and fully responsive seating that connected audience members to one other, so that when one person moved they moved everyone else. We also worked with olfactory artist Smell Arts to create a very specific post-cyclonic scent. It was incredible to hear later how these sensory elements reminded audiences of other oceans, other experiences, and really helped them to tap into the embodied placefulness of the work. We had many conversations with people afterwards about how the installation left them reflecting on their own relations and responsibilities to globally shared ecosystems. We were very happy to have sold out shows for every session, with far more people wanting to come than we could accommodate; it was a testament to the broad interest in hearing these voices and sounds.

KOOZ The project at Ocean Space also plays on this idea of narratives: Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania makes a portmanteau or conjunction between storytelling and the project of restoration. How do these notions play across the work of Elisapeta Heta and Latai Taumoepeau?

THFirstly, it’s great to hear about this incredible archive of testimonies that Oceanic Refractions is contributing to the body of knowledge. Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania is a response to an invitation from Ocean Space, to curate an exhibition around Oceania during the Venice Biennale.

Ocean Space is an institution that already has a commitment to the preservation of marine life. I was thinking about where we are right now, globally. The planet is being exhausted; the depletion of water and extraction of resources impacts people, mostly indigenous people, living on the front lines. For Oceania, one of the biggest threats is the idea of mining the seabed; digging down to extract minerals without understanding the impact on the people who live there or the rest of the world. So I wanted to question this global narrative of why we need these minerals, why we need to keep extracting.

This goes back to this Western idea of progression, expansion, of needing more — and to the idea that the Pacific or Oceania belongs to the world. That narrative still exists, as the ocean has no borders, whether they be around territories or depths or other species. But for the people who live in Oceania, we don't believe this at all. Latai Taumoepeau has been living on Gadigal land in Sydney, Australia; her people are from Tonga and she is deeply affected by this idea of deep sea mining (DSM). The idea was to invite her to respond to this issue, while also thinking about the site of Ocean Space in Venice, located inside a church — this space that is built for spirituality and communal worship. There are many layers around spirituality and storytelling at play.

Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta, who is of Maori and Tokelau Samoan heritage, is a principal designer in an architectural firm. I wanted to invite her to speak to Western audiences within a highly designed architectural space such as the church, to think about how her people feel about spirituality and Oceania. She reconnected with her ancestral belief systems of the Atea or Atua of Polynesia, the meeting of our cosmogonies and this idea of collaboration, of deep listening and being connected to the environment. In bringing these two responses by strong women from different parts of Oceania, and myself — as well as other voices through the internet, through meetings, through Ocean Uni — the idea was really to gather these ideas in one space, during the most visible event in the global art calendar year.

The title Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania, actually came quite late in the process, because it wasn't really about a title or a framework. It was really about people-centred intentions and what is important to them; their stories are what will bring people together. It was really to bring a global sense of collective care around the Moana, around Oceania, around the deep sea. Actually I wanted to start off by saying that Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania is a play on this idea of restoration and conservation, when really it's the power of the story — our ancestral stories, that colonisation has attempted to erode or dismiss. It's about restoring the stories, the narratives around place, how we consider place and our care for the deep sea. Interestingly within this idea, many stories came up about the beginnings of human life, which come from the bottom of the ocean. In each of the installations, you will find a very highly reflective representation of that deep sediment desired by the West, to extract these minerals.

KOOZ Thank you for sharing how the project unfolds in space. I couldn't help but recall your installation at the same venue in 2021, The Soul Expanding Ocean, which also looked at the seabed, spirituality and forms of extraction; your curation of Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania also amplifies this need for a multiplicity of stories.

TH Yes, I definitely feel that we need many stories, across many different islands and bodies. We are not alone, even though we're very different and we have many different languages. We're connected by the ocean; we are people-centred in that relationality. So these forums are only going to help us understand where we are and where we need to go. We are living in a precarious time — environmentally, socially, economically and politically — but ironically, we're also at a point where we know we have the knowledge. We have the ability to restore, but change will really come with establishing a relationship. I think the more we build these connections, it can only help.

AK To add to these artists important work, there is a wealth of advocacy and creativity from across the region, by groups like the Pacific Network on Globalisation and Youngsolwara, against deep-seabed mining. These don't often make it into European cultural spaces. That’s the importance of what Taloi is saying — about the need for all of these different stories to be made available to audiences, the strong movements for self determination and liberation, the many fronts on which Oceanian communities are constantly pushing against these kinds of extractive propositions. Also, due to neocolonialism, imperialism, and climatic crisis, the pressures that governments are facing. What is our role as conduits or amplifiers of that, within the differential power structures and networks of resources that we have access to?

KOOZ How do you envision your reciprocal research continuing, in line with this ambition building and amplifying these narratives? Given that it has already evolved from a space into a platform, how do you envision the continuation of Oceanic Refractions?

AK Oceanic Refractions will continue touring over time. The National Gallery in Fiji is hosting workshops and screenings, and an iteration was recently exhibited at the Festival of Pacific Arts in Hawai’i. We were honoured to present alongside the animated short films Soli Bula by Tumeli Tuqota, and Atu Emberson Bain, Melino Bain-Vete, Siale Bain-Vete and Anga'aefonu Bain-Vete’s Cries from the Moana. We are in the process of a second audio-visual artwork with fisherpeople and dive masters. We have long term plans with community listening workshops running alongside the exhibit. The design and editorial of the website by Studio Folder and Elise Misao Hunchuck is so important to the life of the project, and making sure it reaches as many people as possible who might not be able to get to see the physical art installation. It is an archive, where texts from Pacific writers, scholars and artists, testimonies, art and audio recordings will accumulate over time. At the moment the website features reflections on the installation and radio works alongside pieces by Oceanian scholars whose work has influenced the project. The website has been specifically engineered to identify and adapt to bandwidth limitations by changing resolution without taking away from content and aesthetics, this is an important feature for communities where consistent internet is unavailable, and especially so when working with audio-visual materials.

MNIn terms of supporting the ongoing archive through the website, one conversation that Amer and I continue to have is about how the work can be archived within local communities. That will continue to be part of our process and it relates, as Taloi said, to the importance of many stories. Aligned with our ethics and principles we pay all our collaborators equitably. We are ensuring that every time our work is shown, we channel a portion of funds — as well as inviting exhibiting partners to contribute — to a financial trust that we are setting up here in Fiji, in discussion with like-minded collaborators and organisations like the Pacific Feminist Fund, guided by our regional advisory board. There are very limited funding and exhibition options for artists from the Pacific region. The Trust will redistribute money and resources tointerdisciplinary artists, researchers and creators based in the Pacific Islands working in the Oceanic space, telling these much-needed stories and bringing their work into community with others.

KOOZ Taloi, your first exhibition at Ocean Space shared your own work; in the current exhibition, you have curated the work of these two artists. Of course, your research has continued in the meantime; where do you imagine this work leading you?

TH Well, Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania is clearly a visual arts exhibition; it has received amazing responses and it comes down in Venice in the middle of October. Who knows what happens next in the art world, but I do know that it's changed the lives of a lot of people — particularly for Latai, whose work is a campaign, indeed so is her whole life, her practice. Her embodied practice is around her commitment to her place, but more alarmingly, the climate emergencies. For Elisapeta too, it's in her daily practice as a designer and as a woman of Oceania; I believe it's going to live with us and extend our own experiences. I do believe that there will be further iterations of their campaigns and their works.

I consider it like a ritual; if we take the word exhibition away and call it a ritual, it's a beautiful way to think about what makes art different for Oceanic peoples from a Western idea of the art world. In the very makeup of both artists' exhibitions, they extended to their communities; they invited collaboration. Any resources that went into making the work actually went back to their communities and their collaborators. Working with family at the intersections between art and environment, and appealing to the government — these can be very vulnerable spaces. To work in dialogue with the NGO and the civil society that art and storytelling has a place; to show the politician or the miner that art can expose the lies and myths around needing minerals and extraction for a green future — art is a very powerful language.

What’s next is a fluid answer to an unknown future. The exhibition has strengthened this idea that when we meet, share and exchange stories, rather than let borders define us. We stretch the imagination; the most interesting, exciting place for me is with each other. The work that Mere and Amer are doing is in this cross-intersectional space of bodies, ages, cultures and technologies, as well.

One thing I did want to note is that when our people meet — and when I say our people, I mean the people of Oceanic bodies coming from the South to the Global North — we are extremely conscious of being on other people's land. Both Elisapeta and Latai, with their collaborators and community, were very conscious of being in the lagoon and on Venetian land. Throughout the process, the people of Venice acknowledged this sharing the importance of our need to have a relationship to water. Perhaps living in the West, in built-up environments, has divorced people from having a personal or spiritual relationship with their natural water sources. For instance, the state of the pollution, which means that you cannot swim in the lagoon, or how policed, controlled and managed the bodies of water are. That was a really defining moment in meeting people from the Global North; this realisation of the deep relationship that Oceanic peoples have with water. It's a very intimate relationship, and it opened up peoples’ eyes to that possibility. Perhaps the first step is that every citizen develops this relationship to their environment. If you have a relationship with something, you don't want to hurt it. It was an honour to be part of a process with both artists, their communities and Ocean Space in bringing about that dialogue.

KOOZ That’s such a beautiful way to end today; seeking to imagine further across time, across geographies, and always in conversation.

AK Thank you; thanks Taloi.

TH Thanks for bringing us together.

Bios

AM Kanngieser is a geographer and sound artist. They are a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow in GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway, University of London. Their practice engages listening and attunement to approach how communities determine conditions of liberation and care in the face of ecocide. They are the author of Experimental Politics and the Making of Worlds (2013) and Between Sound and Silence: Listening toward Environmental Relations (forthcoming), and have published extensively in interdisciplinary journals including South Atlantic Quarterly and WIREs Climate Change. Their audio work has been commissioned internationally by Documenta 14 Radio, BBC 3, ABC Radio National, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Savvy Gallery Berlin, The Natural History Museum London, Arts Centre Melbourne, Radio MACBA, CTM Festival, Radio del Museo Reina Sofía and Deutschland Radio, amongst many others.

Mere Nailatikau is an indigenous Fijian sound artist. She has co-produced work that focuses on the listening cultures of Pacific peoples. Her sound art has been commissioned by CTM Festival and Deutschland Radio and presented at the Struer Sound Art Biennale. She holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of Minnesota, where she studied as a Fulbrighter. With a background in research, communications, and public diplomacy, her writing has been published in the Commonwealth Writers Blog, Climate Tracker, the Lowy Interpreter, and The Diplomat.

Taloi Havini (Nakas Tribe, Hakö people) is an artist and curator born in Arawa, Autonomous Region of Bougainville and is currently based in Brisbane, Australia. She employs a research practice informed by her matrilineal ties to her land and communities in Bougainville. This manifests in works created using a range of media including photography, audio – video, sculpture, immersive installation and print.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.