No.1 Neighbour: Art in Papua New Guinea 1956-2016

113 STRONG WOMEN №1 NEIGHBOUR Installation views of Beroana (shell money) 2015, ‘Primavera 2015: Young Australian Artists’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia / Photographs: Jessica Maurer / Images courtesy: The artist The process requires much time and skill to collect, grind, shape and drill (by hand) thousands of individual disks that are gathered onto lengths of string; they are then used to trade for important items. Passed down through generations, beroana is also used in ceremony, such as weddings, funerals and reconciliations. The beroana I have made out of earthenware, stoneware and porcelain comments on how shell money has, in a sense, became a relic in our region. IS THE FORM THAT THE INSTALLATION TAKES IMPORTANT? When beroana is not worn on the body, it is suspended or placed in settings where it is seen to carve space. Shell money embodies a relationship-based economic system and cannot be compared to coins, for which a government fixes the value. IN THE EXHIBITION, BEROANA (SHELL MONEY) IS SHOWN WITH YOUR PHOTOGRAPHIC WORK MIDDLE TAILINGS (BOUGAINVILLE COPPER LTD, PANGUNA MINE) . WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THESE WORKS? The history of how mining came to Bougainville is important — all these materials that are churned into wealth are sourced from the earth (shells, clay, copper, gold). We are all subject to the economy of the day and forced into believing we have a need for mining one material over another. In Bougainville, this has created so much harm and destruction, displacement and conflict. It is important to understand that a robust non‑Western economy thrived long before the arrival of explorers, whalers, geologists, scientists, and military and colonial officials. The colonial era saw the government ban the use of beroana in ‘transactions involving white people’, 2 and yet overseas museum collections have vast holdings of beroana collected from the south-west Pacific. Here, where Middle Tailings and Beroana sit together, I question whose wealth is more important. 1 Beatrice Blackwood, Both Sides of Buka Passage: An Ethnographic Study of Social, Sexual, and Economic Questions in the North-Western Solomon Islands , Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1935. 2 Blackwood, p.448.