The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

40 for social consciousness than reggae. Across one third of the world’s surface, Pacific people come together to make reggae, continuing an oral history, regardless of what is happening outside the ‘one saltwater’. 13 Today, Pacific reggae is flourishing; musicians travel throughout the region to perform in concerts and festivals, such as the annual Fest’Napuan festival, which began in 1996, and where, on a large outdoor stage on the lawns of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, musicians play to crowds gathered in their thousands. Pacific Reggae: Roots Beyond the Reef, co-curated with Brent Clough, brings together reggae artists from Hawai’i, New Zealand, Australia and Melanesia. It presents their unique approaches to this music genre which originated in Jamaica. Through video clips, playlists, interviews, documentaries and live performances, the project shows how reggae is one of the Pacific’s most valued means of communication. As Clough argues, reggae is used by many in these island nations to highlight the political and social problems that are often ignored due to the promotion of tourism-related language and images. 14 For reggae, the language of choice is principally a local form of pidgin. Melanesian pidgin (Hawai’i has its own) arose in the nineteenth century, when Europeans were harvesting and trading sandalwood and sea cucumbers (known as bêche-de-mer in French), and had to develop a common form of communication. It was primarily during the ‘blackbirding’ period, however, that Melanesian men developed pidgin as a communicative tool of survival used between themselves and the overseers. Those men who returned to their own countries continued using pidgin when working with foreigners, and the language proliferated. The form of pidgin in Vanuatu is Bislama (derived from the phonetic bêche-de-mer ), and is now one of the archipelago’s official languages, with ni-Vanuatuans also speaking English and French, as well as a number of their own vernacular languages. 15 Although pidgin languages across Melanesia have developed their own lexicons, for the most part they are widely understood. This doesn’t explain how the blond-dreadlocked, Papuan-raised O-shen can sing ‘Meri Lewa’ in 26 Roots at home in Espíritu Santo, Vanuatu Photograph: Dan Cole