Six years ago today, Vunilagi Vou was launched in Shop 4, 256 Great South Road, Ōtāhuhu, South Auckland. The opening exhibition, WWJD:2, featuring 13 impressive Pacific artists, was the first of 18 exhibitions Vunilagi Vou has proudly produced in six years.
Social media – particularly Instagram – has been the backbone of the community and audience that has supported the work of Vunilagi Vou since 2019. I’ve loved promoting exhibitions and events over the years, amplifying artists and ideas. It has been a challenge to be a one-woman-show AND be the social media content producer and voice, but I’ve always enjoyed storying this adventure. Writing captions for Instagram is this undercover genre of short-form writing that has come to personify the intangible goal, agenda… mission that I’ve quietly been on for the past two decades.
Next year will mark 20 years since launching my first blog platform, Colour Me Fiji. It documented and archived my work as a curator and gallerist for Fresh Gallery Ōtara. After Fresh, I started PIMPIknows, a cheeky acronym for Pacific Island Management, Production + Ideas. It continued the work of Colour Me Fiji and documented more freelance curatorial projects, from pop-up exhibitions and events at barber shops, old libraries and cafes to A Maternal Lens, the exhibition I curated for the 4th International Biennial of Casablanca in 2018. And then, came Vunilagi Vou.
Reflecting on this six year anniversary of Vunilagi Vou, it occurs to me that the mission has always been the same. The ebbs and flows of the pandemic climate that instigated multiple pivots and reconfigurations left this one-woman-show somewhat disoriented. The changeable tides of funding and favour have shifted the nature of the arts landscape, and Vunilagi Vou’s place within it.
A 2023 Theory of Change was developed as an anchor, an effort to ground the philosophy of this work and hopefully, maybe, align it with broader efforts within the sector. But in actuality, it helped articulate why the broader sector was not in alignment with what Vunilagi Vou was, and is, and always has stood for.
In the developments that followed this pivotal Theory of Change realisation, Vunilagi Vou transitioned into a creative studio, closed gallery operations and I enrolled into the Master of Applied Indigenous Knowledge programme at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. Whilst studying and doing consultancy work, making art and storying these changes across social channels (good bye Twitter, hello Bluesky), a different path started to emerge.
The 2024 exhibition project, Solesolevaki, for Tautai Gallery was not only a perfectly timed opportunity for practice-based research that has informed my broader Masters enquiry, but it again demonstrated where my practice, and this mission, sits in relation to the dynamics of the arts industry.
This month, I had the opportunity to travel home to Suva, where the idea for Vunilagi Vou was born, at home in Wailoku at my parents’ house. Returning home to Suva is always soul-affirming. This trip was particularly special though because I got to deliver two talks at Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies, at the University of the South Pacific (USP), where my practice as an artist began.
The Molikilagi Bure at Oceania Centre was such a special venue; a multipurpose open space for teaching, learning and listening, inside a contemporary symbol of Indigenous architecture.
It felt profoundly important to present my practice and thinking as an iTaukei (Indigenous Fijian) artist-curator to USP students, and later to a full bure / full house of friends, family and folk interested in making exhibitions and making art. I was so moved to hear the commentary from the room, from students doing under- and post-graduate degrees in Fijian Studies and Pacific Studies, education and psychology, artists and mothers and teachers; my heart was beyond full. To speak about 25 years of practice in a room with both my parents and my godparents, and people networked through knowing and belonging, in Fiji, in the middle of Oceania, felt like the height of accountability.
I spent the afternoon in deep talanoa with a fellow postgraduate student in the Fijian Studies space, discussing Indigenous feminisms, veiqia (Fijian female tattooing), ceremonies and faith, framing and positionality as Indigenous Fijian women. Feeling part of a community of Indigenous enquiry felt incredibly meaningful. My deepest gratitude to Oceania Centre Director, Dr. Katrina Igglesden, for enabling these opportunities.
I also spent time in Suva at the Pasifika Futures Forum where Reverend Professor Dr. Upolu Vaai, Manu Folau (Vice Chancellor), Pasifika
Communities University (Formerly Pacific Theological College), left me deeply inspired thinking about the weaponisation of linear time. He discussed the need of re-storying the development narrative, remembering that relationships defined by linear time and outcomes are no longer defined by love. Fijian futurist writer Dr. Gina Cole discussed imagination as data, and an antidote to fatalism. Through imagining a Fijian future in her novel, Na Viro, where space is an ocean and the ocean is a galaxy, we can start to imagine what the future might feel like, not as escapism but as a rehearsal. It was so beautifully poetic and profound.
Futures, as a discipline, opened up so much thinking in my mind. And so critical in this expansive thinking is the ways in which imagination, creativity and Indigenous knowledge systems can be harnessed.
So, on this milestone, where Vunilagi Vou today is a vastly different form from Vunilagi Vou in 2019, a future I could never have imagined, I’m optimistic. The ‘arts’ may be where this venture started, but in reality, the mission has always been broader, deeper, more radical. The future I imagine now involves writing and publishing, textiles and making, talanoa and dreaming.
In October, I deliver my exegesis, a critical interpretation and iTaukei (Indigenous Fijian) framing of curatorial practice, and a taonga tuku iho – the reciprocal artefact of my rangahau (research) as contribution to my communities. This is the real milestone, I think. A juncture, a restoration.
Vinaka vakalevu for six years of support for Vunilagi Vou – here’s to new beginnings, radical missions and the vunilagi – the space of pure potentiality, between Aotearoa and Fiji!
