The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

built something, a new home for all of us. Taking a cue from the ocean’s ever-flowing and encircling nature, we will travel far and wide to connect with oceanic and maritime peoples elsewhere, and swap stories of voyages that we have taken and those yet to be embarked upon. We will show them what we have, and learn from them different kinds of music, dance, art, ceremonies, and other forms of cultural production. Together we may even make new sounds, new rhythms, new choreographies, and new songs and verses about how wonderful and terrible the sea is, and how we cannot live without it. We will talk about the good things the oceans have bestowed upon us, the damaging things that we have done to them, and how we must together try to heal their wounds and protect them forever. I have said elsewhere that there are no more suitable people on earth to be the custodians of the oceans than those for whom the sea is their home. We seem to have forgotten that we are such a people. Our roots, our origins are embedded in the sea. All our ancestors, including those who came as recently as sixty years ago, were brought here by the sea. Some were driven here by war, famine and pestilence; some were brought by necessity, to toil for others; and some came seeking adventures and perhaps new homes. Some arrived in good health, others barely survived the traumas of passage. For whatever reasons, and through whatever experiences they endured, they came by sea to the Sea, and we have been here since. If we listen attentively to stories of ocean passage to new lands, and of other voyages of yore, our minds would open up to much that is profound in our histories, to much of what we are and what we have in common. Contemporary developments are taking us away from our sea roots. Most of our modern economic activities are land-based. We travel mostly by air, flying miles above the oceans, completing our journeys in hours instead of days and weeks and months. We rear and educate our young on things that have scant relevance to the sea. Yet we are told that the future of most of our countries lies there. Have we forgotten so much that we will not easily find our way back to the ocean? As a region, we are floundering because we have forgotten or spurned the study and contemplation of our pasts, even of our recent histories, as irrelevant for the understanding and conduct of our contemporary affairs. We have thereby allowed others who are well-equipped with the so-called objective knowledge of our historical development to continue reconstituting and reshaping our world and ourselves with impunity, and in accordance with their shifting interests at any given moment in history. We have tagged along with this for so long that we have kept our silence even though we have been virtually defined out of existence. We have floundered, also, because we have considered regionalism mainly from the point of view of individual national interests rather than those of a wider collectivity; and we have failed to build any clear and enduring regional identity because we have continued to construct edifices with disconnected traits from traditional cultures and passing events, without basing them on concrete foundations. The regional identity proposed here has been constructed on a base of concrete reality. The sea is as real as you and I, it shapes the character of this planet, it is a major source of our sustenance, and it is something that we all share in common wherever we are in Oceania: these are all statements of fact. Above that level of everyday experience, the sea is our pathway to each other and to everyone else, the sea is our endless saga, the sea is our most powerful metaphor, the ocean is in us. EXCERPT FROM ‘THE OCEAN IN US’ OPPOSITE LISA REIHANA New Zealand b.1964 Maui (from ‘Digital Marae’ series) (detail) 2007 Digital colour print on crystal flex paper on aluminium / 200 x 120cm / Purchased 2008 with funds from the Estate of Vincent Stack through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery FOLLOWING PAGES SOPOLEMALAMA FILIPE TOHI Tonga/New Zealand b.1959 Maquettes (installation view) 2003–12 Balsa wood, PVA glue / Courtesy: The artist / Photograph: Sam Hartnett 1 Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘Oceania’, The Contemporary Pacific , no.10, pp.391–410, © 1998 University of Hawai‘i Press. Reprinted by permission. 2 Albert Wendt, ‘Towards a new Oceania’, originally published in Mana , vol.1, no.1, 1976, p.49. 3 Wendt, p.60. 82