The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Soil is a country shaped by excessive exhibitions of foreign artefacts. The artefacts taken from my country without permission (shaped and grown by soil) are stored and exhibited in many museums in Germany, America, the United Kingdom, Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand, to name a few. These artefacts, when documented, photographed, framed then exhibited, give shape to their people, visitors, tourists and education systems, practically leaving my country, unshaped. That means the house I lived in as a child is seen as a house without a shape. It has no human features . It also means the museum had my countenance, my bones, my mouth, eyes and hair. Artefacts have long been seen as stratified by anthropologists and historians. My personal way of seeing through a new genus reflection, a species mirrored in museums through glass and the way glass interacts with light and artefacts, is my way of copying treasures, un-stratifying these layers. Glass records and memorises like humans. Studying exchanges this way is a way of creating shelter for the duration of my life, yet it is still seen as primitive, traditional . This raises questions about definitions, acts of misleading answers about human capillaries connected lucidly to different placentas, especially power held in one hand over certain terrains and plateaus, a place where instead of all being well, all is not well. I was raised in Otara, a suburb culturally distant from the rest of New Zealand. We often joked that visitors need a passport to enter. Otara still remains a sprawling suburb of state houses and home to a large population of Pacific Island immigrants. It is devoid of the minerals needed to reveal the asbestos used as landfill to build state houses. I want to be able to scrape away lanugo in order to expose veins, arteries, and developing without knowledge of God or church, poverty. The state house was my museum with artefacts exhibited inside. Lei adorned the photographs on the walls, along with faded Christmas cards, television, and an orange lounge suite. In Auckland many different languages circulate around our tongues in our own time and own space: Niuean, Rotuma, Tongan, Samoan, Maori, Pakeha New Zealand, Chinese, Korean, Tokelau, Tuvalu, Cook Islands, Indian, and recently Somalians and white South Africans who supported apartheid. 30 APT2002 John Pule Clear the pathway to walk on (Kia Fakata e ha/a ke fano a au) 1999 Oil on canvas 198.5 x 198.5cm Courtesy:The artist and Gow-Langsford Gallery, Auckland Living on another people's land perplexes the sense of permanence. Soil experiences this, so do I. The question arises whether it is possible for me to visualise land materialise within a land because of plants. I like to think that planting is one way to answer this question. The mixing of soils creates a ground. Since every living thing needs water to survive, I have embedded as vocals in my mouth the middle position long associated with rain, and from where I speak. Definitely ships and perhaps much later airplanes became part of this migration, which accompanied newness and uniqueness as the newly arrived plants accumulating residual moisture as part of preparatory travels arrived to these shores; soil already preceding roots. Inside the soil is a system of influential prophets and custodians whom I poetically sing as tufuga. The eyes of this inverted spectrum exploded in my face, changing the colours of my eyes, which were tired of pursuing past exchanges, demanding that mobility begin once the throat is scraped to release destinations. This may also be true about my hands at times appearing pallid, now used to turning pages and reading about the colonial sufferings of small Pacific nations. Soil must exist outside of the mind. It shouldn't be seen as an activity characterised by boundaries. Uncertainty is what remains from this unshaped world, structured around a desire to see rather than to know, since knowing is usually encrypted with foreign disease. Remnants of colonisation still cause rooms in my house to release their odours to the future, ordeals and hardships waiting for ambulances. I could privilege sentimental stamps extricated from envelopes depicting the Resolution, requiring for me a number and a letterbox to live in. But I have much to talk about. Spirit, assembled out of coincidence. Soul, fathomed out of numerous preludes about plantations. I am in love with that stone, that tree, that ever encompassing beach; adding depth to my inexperience. Dance makes soil, shaping the air space above it to suit the changes bought about by supervised exchanges of cultures.