For Wellington City Council’s Spring Festival – Te Wā o te Kōanga, I’m excited to be delivering an artist talk in the Treehouse Visitor Centre, nestled in the trees at Wellington Botanic Gardens ki Paekākā.
As part of the Ahikaea, a fantastic programme of free Māori and Pacific events within the Spring Festival, I’m looking forward to sharing some ideas and thinking around connection to the natural world as an non-indigenous, Indigenous person, i.e. indigenous to somewhere else.
Meke vula : embodiment, memory and the Moon – An iTaukei-Aotearoa perspective
Artist-curator Vasemaca Tavola was mainly raised in the Northern Hemisphere where she spent her childhood celebrating her birthday in the spring. When she moved to Aotearoa aged 16, her birthday season became autumn. On her life-long journey to strengthen her knowledge, connection and relationship with her birthplace Fiji, spring as a season does not exist. Whilst spring in Aotearoa is a time for new growth, warmer weather and relief from the cold, for Tavola, the season remains somewhat elusive, untethered to a concrete sense of time or geography.
Meke vula is a movement or dance directed by, in reverence of and performed beneath the Moon. To define meke vula as a practice of Fiji’s iTaukei Indigenous past is to flatten time across an axis of colonialism, polarising old and introduced spiritualities and moralities, extracting the body from its relationship to the Moon and all it governs.
In Aotearoa, the broad discourse and scholarship surrounding the maramataka expands the lunar calendar from an Indigenous knowledge system guiding planting, fishing, food cycles and sustainability, to include the Moon’s impact on water, energy and the body. Although sometimes debated, the state of embodiment by the Moon’s cycles is a deeply felt reality for people with wombs, who bleed and learn throughout life to move through cycles of flux and flow, surrender and vitality.
Like the maramataka, the iTaukei Indigenous Fijian lunar calendar is based on planting and fishing seasons, but what happens when our feet are no longer in the soil? How can ecological wisdom be retained and transmitted across generations and geographies if relationality with the natural world is purely externalised?
Embodiment is defined as a psychological state of bodily connection; re-learning connection is to remember that we are bodies of water, not living in the natural world but made of it. If time and seasons can be as multidimensional as the lived experience of Indigenous people who move and migrate all over the globe, what are the ways we can ground ourselves in the natural world?
Tavola’s practice centres Indigenous artists and ideas, multidimensionality of Indigenous experience, dreaming and transformation. For Ahikaea, Tavola offers a visual feast of creative ideas to inspire fresh conversations about creativity, elusive seasonality, embodiment and the Moon.