The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Inside us the dead generates soil, extending an invitation to experience the ordeals of our ancestors' perspiring attitudes, gifting unfinished legacies for the future to elaborate on memories and obstinate inquiries. It is human habit to visit places if it means seeing acts of exchange. Sometimes windows in the bone present themselves as a collection of faces, mostly of a foreign nature, but this does not hinder the evolutions taking place. The window farthest away is more likely to enclose roads bordered not only with state houses, but also with hopes of peace. Then again the w indow I often looked through faced out upon exhausted people waiting at police stations. I like to see birth as well and this majestic space usually floats around doors, since the space between an open door and the frame that holds the door generates a long list of islands spat upon by Americans. I don't like to, as some visitors do, overstay my welcome, as these islands are best viewed as photographs, yet occasionally as statues of gaiety, fuckable duskimaidens, and the happiest men. I have come to a conclusion about why people's shadows stretch without a future into doors and windows: all this co-exists inside the music of bone flutes. I HAD A MIND AS INVISIBLE AS LIGHT In High and low 2002 the infusion of soils from different countries activates a physiognomy of two personas. Instantly a potential for film evolving in astounding visions of transparent bodies: people wandering around near the base of Rangitoto or Gethsemane, carrying birds to enable lines perspire the intrusion; releasing fish from mouths, erasing statistics of my race so I could celebrate great joy seeing health restored to indigenous languages. I was uncertain about the waiting St John ambulances.These symbols of illnesses were really here to resuscitate octaves higher than hurricanes, luminous only at petrol stations, refuelling to assist meaningless protest marches by labourers. Matthew, Luke, and John were discussing the synoptic gospels baptised as Parousia . Parousia, to put it simply is when Jesus descends on clouds to judge then divide people into two camps: those who are going to heaven and those who are going to hell. I imagined a Polynesian vision of bloody sweat of red clouds descending to earth; each cloud wiped so bloody rivers travel like soliloquy, manifesting imaginary customs on Aeolian soils, encouraging settlement as a form of compensation. The idea of red clouds perfumed as micro-paradisiacal isles connected to each other by ladders, planks, steps, each one balancing groups of people as if they justified lines to be traced backwards, carrying materials to build better housing in poverty-stricken communities, prepared me for the festival ahead. Even mountains are dragged across these human surpluses as a way to stratify countries. Clouds appeared in horizontal elliptic ovate, a shape recently introduced to air, the other, a non-hallucinatory landscape moved closer, cumulus clouds materialising festivals of people, emigrants from deserts, war-torn countries, apartheid regimes. Standing on the heads of people were birds associated so closely with the heads suggested uncertainties of these mean spirited-times. 34 APT2002 On certain terrains spectators appeared agitated, so I approached as a visitor. I saw three clouds. On the smallest one a head of a bird left waiting, its wings nearby. On the large cloud, billowing out to encompass solitude, stood a tower of Niuean Hiapo. More people were working to lift a hurt man. It looked like Jesus, lifted up a ladder. A St John ambulance was waiting; I felt honoured it was named after me. A small ink mountain floated above. A crucifix denotes commercialism . Below, lost in perilous taciturnity, sat a lone musician, a countenance similar to Dante (judge, juror) strumming a guitar. In I had a mind as invisible as light, one guy on his back gifted an apple to a bird perched on his feet; another balanced a mountain on a fishing rod. I jumped from cloud to cloud. A small white child offered a chair. I declined, preferring to use the safety of my camera to document madness. Individuals carried chairs across a plank. I followed. My guess was brilliant they were here for a colloquium. Prominent throughout the movie were vines that grew profusely down from underneath the clouds, twisting around the isles below, releasing leaves to form a lamina of forests. Inferior synoptic evenings bursting chrysanthemum. On lower terraces variations typical of introduced paradigms, masked in research and grants, a separate species synonymous with signatures, is seen using callipers to measure the distance indigenous knowledge has progressed. I noticed one paradigm bearing a remarkable superficial resemblance to excrement, unconscious of its ignorant phenomenal excoriation of sentient cultures. On the other side of High and low numerous parallel lateral veins, in proportion to the Air Puloto airplane above the words of resistance composed of tiny wisdom, rested on a calmer cloud. I enjoyed these words for their sincerity, abundance of wairua; positive portrayals of cultures, refugees, exiles, migrants, and especially above the words fanau, a plant cultivated to germinate on its head. Distributed around various areas described as having an affinity with sorry and reconciliation, leaves settled on common ground. From the side of a word manatu commonly used to remind me of my ancestor, a ladder distinguished itself from others because of its propensity to shift and change at the entrance of a church, which stood alone on its own terrace. Stems straggling around red cascades appeased my vision to see more, and I did, when I was led to believe the decolonisation process of the mind had been completed. Easily propagated organically these cascades terminated into chairs, reminding me that I too am a spectator, standing among dense clusters of lateral branches, imagining the systems and beliefs of a pan-tropical community could for once let the hurt man down and tell him to go live a normal life.