Sitting With My Legs Crossed–Unfolding

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Notes

1 Literally translated as the Great Ocean of Kiwa-Kiwa a.diefi ed ancestor, one of the guardians of the ocean and famed navigator.

2 I.use the term ‘art practice’ to incorporate all aspects of my practice, visual and performative.

3 ‘Ka Haka: Empowering Performance’, New Zealand’s first Māori and Indigenous performance studies symposium was held on Ngā Wai o Horotiu Marae at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) on 8–9 September 2016 accessed 10/01/20 https://news.aut.ac. nz/news/ka-haka- empowering-mori-and- indigenous-performance

4 These are the three tenets of the SaVĀge Methodology I have developed to highlight the particle vā within the structure of the word. Culti.VĀ.te (research phase), FAB.ricate (construction/ installation) and Acti.VĀ.te (using the vā body to animate the mauli embedded in the works creating a space of connection) Vā: a Samoan term for space. (Please note there are cultural variations and applications to the term vā.) It adheres time to space. This space is not a linear space, or indeed an empty one. The vā is activated by people, binding people and things together, forming relationships and reciprocal obligations.

5 Moana is my preferred Indigenous term to replace ‘Pacific’, as it does not exclude Māori. NB this is specific to our location here in Aotearoa and the related language groups.

6 Kanaka Maoli is translated as ‘true people’ and is a term adopted in recent years to denote people who can trace Indigenous Hawaiian ancestry before the arrival of Captain Cook.

7 Teves (2018:15).

8 The Pacific Sisters is a collective of Māori and Pacific artists formed in the early 1990s.

9 By the 1970s, the Pacific community, largely imported as a blue-collar workforce from the islands, had become inconvenient to New Zealand’s first covenant between the Māori and the White settler community (Raymond 2018).

10 Treaty of Waitangi.

11 Pākē Salmon, Pacific Sisters Toi Art Gallery Opening – ActiVAtion Te Papa Museum, 10 May 2018, https://bit.ly/3e77YoO

12 Atua-god/goddess, super natural being is a non- gendered noun reflecting the non-binary framing often found within the Polynesian language.

13 The residency was organized in collaboration with the Humboldt Lab Dahlem and the Indigeneity in the Contemporary World; Performance, Politics, Belonging. Led by Professor Helen Gilbert, Royal Holloway, University of London and funded by the European Research Council.

14 Gilbert and Phillipson (2014:112).

15 Ka‘ili, Mahina, Addo (2017).

16 The Scotsman (2010).

17 Refiti (n.d.).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rosanna Raymond

Sistar S'pacific, aka Rosanna Raymond, is an innovator of the contemporary Pasifika art scene as a long-standing member of the art collective the Pacific Sisters and founding member of the SaVAge K'lub. Raymond has achieved international renown for her performances, installations, body adornment and spoken word. A published writer and poet, her works are held by museums and private collectors throughout the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Raymond's practice works with people, spaces and things to acti.VA.te a dynamic relationship between them, to realise and reshape the ta-va duality. This is a choreographic process that extends beyond the frames of art into both domestic routines and ritual protocols. It includes self-adornment and group enactments, activating space and collapsing time using the body and genealogical matter. A former Chesterdale Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, she is currently a researcher for the AUT Marsden funded project Va Moana.