The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

WHEN YOU RETURN John Pule When you return lift your shadow up from the ground, carry it as if it was your pita, sit down with it by the window, enjoy the day The heart of my story is about generating and making soil to stand on. It is a story I heard often as a young man growing up in Auckland. When relatives talked about settlement they always referenced soil in relation to planting and how these two stories became permanent constant citations in our house, as if soil was a human being. It is this experience that is the basis of this essay, in wh ich I will try and describe its metaphorical significance for me as a Niuean emigrant and as an artist. I took note of this story but never really understood that the implications of bringing plants from one country to be replanted in another country would one day have a prominent role embellishing my words and images. These natural human actions have installed themselves as powerful metaphors for an ongoing relationship between Niue and Aotearoa. These are metaphors that conspicuously presented themselves as inspiration for my own art and writing as I began a twenty-year project documenting my family history, and much later I realised it was my way to maintain roots to home. Soil is not an obsessive binding material but a loose substance. It performs one great service for plants in supplying an anchorage into which the roots penetrate in order to find a space, perhaps a reason, to obtain a foothold to temporarily or permanently put down roots . Here, I am referring mainly to dance, literature and the arts. It is from this middle position that I speak and make attempts to clarify these metaphors that whatever is placed into the ground, will be supported by soil. This particular first soil began in the hands of my grandfather, who visited Auckland from Niue in 1944. He disembarked from the cargo-passenger boat Maui Pomare (our link to Aotearoa) holding young shoots of taro, banana, hibiscus, sugar cane, and corn seeds. My father was also on that trip. They stayed with my father's eldest sister, who had arrived two years previously. The shoots they brought were planted in both the front- and backyards of their rented houses. Having to move house because of social or economic situations, they would make cuttings and transport them in damp newspaper to the next property and replant them. I imagined that without hesitation the soil of Aotearoa, its air assisting these plants, alongside water correlated a singing circumference for new guests. Niuean soil, water and minerals proved compatible with the soils of Aotearoa. Eventually granted permission from the climate conditions, our baskets of food prospered on the new land, manufacturing molecules that hovered for decades until the shoots experienced no problems excruciatingly absorbing blood and rich minerals out of the malama and indigenous soil. 28 APT2002 John Pule Niue b.1962 Take these with you when you leave 1998 Oil on canvas 198 x 185cm Collection: The Chartwell Trust Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland This process of cutting, transporting, digging and replanting continues to the present day among various members of my family. I found myself continuing this legacy two years ago when my father's eldest sister died after a long and wonderful life. I simply took a shovel, circled her house, and dug up taro, banana and hibiscus plants, replanting them in my own home. The point I am trying to say here is a personal interpretation of how the ground I stand on now is a mixture of compositional make up of the houses rented or owned by my families, those relatives that lived and died in these houses and in which I lived for long periods are just as relevant to soil making as dance, and literature and the arts. Once a ground is established the space and air above it remains largely unshaped. That unshaped world is where I look to, as I was told a very long time ago that in this once-shaped world propagated sequences and multiplicities of mass phenomena: soil. Sofia Tekela-Smith Aotearoa New Zealand b.1970 John Pule with Pure 2000 Fijian white cowrie shell, waxed thread Collection: The artist Photography: Sofia Tekela-Smith