Lead speaker:
NGAHUIA TE AWEKOTUKU PHD FAWMM MNZM is an Emeritus Professor and Ruānuku/Venerable Elder Scholar of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, New Zealand’s Māori Centre for Research Excellence. She has fought for Māori, women’s and LGBTQI rights for over five decades. Her PhD in 1981 focused on Māori and tourism, igniting a lifelong passion for arts and heritage. In the museum and gallery sector, she has been a curator, lecturer, performer, critic and governor. As well as fiction and poetry, her works on culture, gender and sexuality have been published extensively. She curated the award-winning exhibition E Ngā Ūri Whakatupu: Weaving Legacies (2015), with a small but lavish catalogue. She now lives among the hissing fumaroles and steamy hot pools of her natal village in Rotorua, Aotearoa.
VERONICA STRANG is a Professor of Anthropology at Durham University, where she directed the Institute of Advanced Study from 2012-2021. Her research focuses on human-environmental relations and, in particular, people’s engagements with water. She has conducted ethnographic research in Australia, the UK and New Zealand. In 2000 she received a Royal Anthropological Institute Urgent Anthropology Fellowship, and in 2007 she was awarded an international water prize by UNESCO. Key publications include Uncommon Ground: cultural landscapes and environmental values (1997); The Meaning of Water (2004); Gardening the World: agency, identity and the ownership of water (2009); Ownership and Appropriation (2010); Water: nature and culture (2015); and From the Lighthouse: interdisciplinary reflections on light (2018). She has recently completed a major comparative text about culturally and historically diverse water deities, exploring how they reveal diverse societal trajectories in human-environmental relationships. Water Beings: from nature worship to the environmental crisis will be published by Reaktion in 2023. For more information go to https://www.veronicastrang.com/
Biographies of speakers in alphabetical order:
ALEX SU’A is a lawyer by profession, mostly based and practising as such in Apia, Samoa for 17 years now. Alex is a very proud fa'afafine and President of the Samoa Fa'afafine Association. Alex is also the President of the Samoa Law Society. It has always been Alex’s passion to address issues from a cultural/human rights perspective, that sees the eradication of all forms of violence and discrimination against our indigenous LGBTQI community of fa'afafine and fa'atama in Samoa. At the same time, Alex is always critical of ensuring that they seek out and advocate for opportunities that see to their empowerment and enhancement for equal and better opportunities and treatment in society.
CHANTAL T. SPITZ (1954– ) is a leading Mā’ohi (Tahitian) writer, known for her novels, short stories, essays and poems. A co-founder of the literary review Littéramā’ohi. Ramées de littérature polynésienne (2002– ) she has consistently supported Indigenous writing and decried eurocentric views of the Pacific and its peoples. Her early novel, L’Île des rêves écrasés (1991: Island of Shattered Dreams, 2007) was the first to be published by a Mā’ohi writer. A collection of her essays, Pensées insolentes et inutiles (‘insolent and pointless thoughts’, 2006) includes a detailed analysis of Gauguin’s exploitation of his Indigenous hosts. Her most recent book, Cartes postales (‘postcards’, 2015) depicts a range of characters and situations in which images of an edenic paradise are sharply contrasted with often brutal realities. (Trans. Jean Anderson)
CRISTINA BALDACCI is an associate professor in History of Contemporary Art at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her research interests focus on the archive as a metaphor and art form; the practices of appropriation, montage, reenactment; the theory of images and visual culture; the challenges of art history, art practices and archives in the Anthropocene. Among her most recent publications are: the monograph Impossible Archives: An Obsession of Contemporary Art (Italian edition only, 2016); the article ‘Re-Enacting Ecosystems: Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s Environmental Storytelling in Virtual and Augmented Reality’, Piano B. Arti e Culture Visive, 6.1 (2021): 67–86; the co-edited volumes Double Trouble in Exhibiting the Contemporary: Art Fairs and Shows (2020), Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory (2022), and On Reenactment: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools (forthcoming).
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DAME MEG TAYLOR: After 21 years of service at regional and international institutions, Dame Meg Taylor returned home to Papua New Guinea and currently serves on the Board of Directors of Nambawan Super, the largest superannuation company in Papua New Guinea (PNG), and on the board of the PNG Sustainable Development Program. Dame Meg is a member of the International Advisory Panel for the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and an Advisor to the Vanuatu government on its application to the ICJ on Climate Change. Prior to this, Dame Taylor was the Secretary General of the Pacific Islands Forum, making her the first female to serve in this prestigious role. She is the founding Vice President of the Office of the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman for the International Finance Corporation and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency of the World Bank Group and served on the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Committee for Development Policy and the UN High Level Steering Committee on Every Woman Every Child. Dame Taylor has an LL.B. from Melbourne University and an LL.M. from Harvard University.
DAN TAULAPAPA MCMULLIN is a Fa‘afafine artist and poet from Eastern Sāmoa, with exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, de Young Museum, Auckland Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Musée du Quai Branly. Their film Sinalela (2001) won the 2002 Honolulu Rainbow Film Festival Best Short Film Award. Their book of poems Coconut Milk (University of Arizona Press, 2013) was on the American Library Association Rainbow List Top Ten Books of the Year. Taulapapa’s poem ‘The Bat’ and other early works received a 1997 Poets&Writers Award from The Writers Loft. Taulapapa’s 100 Tikis, a work on appropriation, was the opening night film of the 2016 Présence Autochtone First Peoples Festival in Montreal. Taulapapa’s studio is in Hudson, New York, where they live with their partner.
ERNA LIJE holds an honours degree in Visual Arts, Masters of Museum Studies and received a PhD in Archaeology from University of Sydney. She undertook her first postdoctoral post, as a research associate, at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge (2016-18) and was awarded a Newton Trust Research Fellowship (2018). Lije is the Curator of Indigenous Knowledge and material culture at Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden, the Netherlands.
FANNY WONU VEYS is curator Oceania at the National Museum of World Cultures, a Dutch umbrella organization comprising the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam; Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden; the Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal; and the Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam. There, Veys has curated the Mana Maori exhibition (2010–2011), Things that Matter (2017-), Australian Art (2019-2022), What a Genderful World (2019-2020; 2021-2022), A Sea of Islands (2020-2021) and Treasures from the depot: Easter Island (2022) and has collaborated on many others. She co-curated a barkcloth exhibition Tapa, Étoffes cosmiques d’Océanie in Cahors (France, 2009) and Migrating Objects: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (2020 and 2021). She has previously worked at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge (UK) (2004–2006, 2008–2009) and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (2006–2007) and at the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris) (2007–2008). In 2022 she held the Barbro Klein fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (Uppsala). Her fieldwork sites are New Zealand (since 2000), Tonga (since 2003) and more recently Arnhem Land, Australia (since 2014). She is particularly interested in Pacific textiles, and the significance of historical objects in contemporary settings. She has published widely including her most recent single author book Unwrapping Tongan Barkcloth: Encounters, Creativity and Female Agency (Bloomsbury, 2017) and co-edited book Collecting in the South Sea. The Voyage of Bruni d'Entrecasteaux 1791-1794 (Sidestone Press, 2018).
FRANCA TAMISARI is an associate professor of Cultural Anthropology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Head of the MA Degree in 'Cultural Anthropology Ethnology Anthropological Linguistics’. She taught cultural Anthropology and Indigenous Studies at Sydney University and at the School of Social Science of the University of Queensland. Her main research subjects are cosmology, epistemology and Indigenous Australian religions; art and performance anthropology; applied anthropology; cultural tourism; bicultural education; history of colonial, postcolonial and neocolonial relationships in Australia; methodology of the anthropological encounter. Her latest monograph in italian is “La danza dello squalo. Relazionalità e performance in una comunità yolngu della Terra di Arnehm” (CLEUP 2018).
FRANCESCA TAROCCO is a writer, critic and professor of Buddhist Studies and Chinese religious history. She is currently researching for two new books on Buddhist cosmotechnics and on different trajectories of human-environmental relationships in Sinophone Asia. She has also written for publications including Frieze, Art in America, Parkett and Flashart. Currently, she is the director of Niche -- THE NEW INSTITUTE’S Centre for Environmental Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
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IOANA GORDON-SMITH is an arts writer and curator living in Porirua, Aotearoa. Across her work is a commitment to Moana arts practices and their histories. She has held roles at Artspace Aotearoa, Objectspace,Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, Pātaka Art + Museum. Ioana is the Assistant Curator of Yuki Kihara, Aotearoa New Zealand at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022 and co-curator of the international Indigenous triennial, Naadohbii: To Draw Water. As well as writing for art journals, magazines and exhibition catalogues, Ioana has contributed to publications produced by Thames & Hudson, Routledge, ARP Books and Te Papa Press. ioanagordonsmith.com
LELEI TUISAMOA LELAULU is a development entrepreneur working at the confluences of renewable energy, ocean conservation, and community development, Lelei LeLaulu chairs the Earth Council Alliance, advises the Global Ocean Energy Alliance and helped form the World Bank’s Global Partnership for Oceans. While advising the Pacific Ocean Commissioner and Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General, he was also strategic advisor to the Pacific Leadership Program. An advisor on sustainability to the International Finance Corporation, Lelei, while president/CEO of Counterpart International, introduced Coral Gardening from the Pacific to help regenerate the ailing reefs of Central America and the Caribbean.
MASSIMO WARGLIEN is a full professor of economics and management at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His current main areas of interest are organization theory, behavioural economics, mental models of strategy, culture and economic behaviour, language and interaction, and habits. He is a member of the scientific committee of THE NEW INSTITUTE Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE)
MIRIAMA BONO With an architectural background, polynesian artist Miriama BONO has been the director of the Museum of Tahiti and the Islands since 2017, in charge of the renovation of the institution. Very involved in the Polynesian audiovisual and artistic scene since 2010, she curates the museum's contemporary exhibitions and coordinates all the educational programs for the public and the communities of the French Polynesian islands. Since 2015, she is the President of the association of the FIFO, documentary festival held in Papeete in February.
NICHOLAS THOMAS has done research in the Pacific since the 1980s. His books include Oceanic Art (1995, 2nd. Ed., 2018) and Possessions: Indigenous Art / Colonial Culture / Decolonisation (1999, 2nd. ed. 2022); he co-curated ‘Oceania’ for the Royal Academy of Arts and Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac over 2018-19. He is the Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge.
PIETRO DANIEL OMODEO is a historian of science and philosophy and a professor of philosophy of science at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research focuses on science, philosophy and literature in early Modernity, as well as on historical epistemology. He has been working on the ontological and epistemological premises of medieval and early-modern natural philosophy and science up to the rise of mechanical visions of the world. Omodeo is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Project Institutions and Metaphysics of Cosmology in the Epistemic Networks of Seventeenth-Century Europe, a comparative inquiry of early-modern cosmologies in their institutional, political, and confessional-ideological settings. He is also the Principal Investigator of the FARE project Positioned Cosmology in Early Modernity: The Geo-Praxis of Water-and-Land Management in Venice, which received funding from the Italian Ministry of University and Research.
Professor NATALIE KING OAM is an Australian curator, writer and senior researcher. Current projects include Curator of Yuki Kihara Paradise Camp, Aotearoa New Zealand at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022. In 2017, King was Curator of Tracey Moffatt: My Horizon, Australian Pavilion, the 57th Venice Art Biennale. King has realised projects in India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Italy, Thailand, Bangladesh, New Zealand, New Caledonia, and Vietnam. King is an Enterprise Professor of Visual Arts, University of Melbourne. In 2020, King was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for "service to the contemporary visual arts". She is President of AICA-Australia (International Association of Art Critics, Paris) and series editor of Mini Monographs with Thames & Hudson. In 2021, she was awarded a University of Melbourne Excellence Award for mentoring. www.natalieking.com.au
PATRICK FLORES is a professor of art studies at the University of the Philippines. He is curator of the Vargas Museum and director of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. He cocurated Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art in 2001–03 and the Gwangju Biennale (Position Papers) in 2008. He was a visiting fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1999 and a guest scholar of the Getty Research Institute in 2014. Publications include Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999) and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008). He was the artistic director of the Singapore Biennale in 2019 and curator of the Taiwan Pavilion for the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.
KATERINA TEAIWA is Professor of Pacific Studies in the School of Culture, History and Language, Australian National University. Her research extends from histories of phosphate mining in Oceania, to Pacific arts, culture, environment, and regionalism. She is also a visual artist touring her research-based exhibition Project Banaba. Katerina has won several educational awards including the national teaching excellence award for “Australian University Teacher of the Year 2021” from Universities Australia.
SARA DE VIDO is associate professor of international law in the department of economics at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She is affiliated with the Manchester International Law Centre (UK), where she co-founded the Women in International Law Network (Wilnet). She extensively wrote about violence against women, referring specifically to the Istanbul Convention of the Council of Europe. In 2021 she co-edited a report on countering violence against women in 31 European States for the European Commission. Her latest work is “Violence against women's health in international law” (Manchester University Press, 2020). She is now carrying on research regarding environmental law and how to adopt an ecocentric feminist approach in international law.
SHAUL BASSI is a full professor of English literature and head of studies of the Master's Degree in Environmental Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research, teaching and publications are divided between Shakespeare, environmental humanities, postcolonial theory and literature (India and Africa), and Jewish studies. He is the co-founder and former director of the international literary festival Incroci di civiltà and the former director of the International Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca'Foscari. He is a member of the scientific committee of THE NEW INSTITUTE Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE)
SUSANNE FRANCO is Associate Professor and she teaches Dance History, Theater History, and Performance Studies at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice where is also Rector's delagate for theatre activities. Her research interests and publications focus on dance and performance history, dance research methodology, body history, and French, German and North American theatrical cultures. She is a founding member of the Research Network for Italian Dance Studies AIRdanza (Associazione Italiana per la Ricerca sulla Danza) and more recently of CoDa | Cultures of Dance funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). She has published extensively on modern and contemporary dance. Her recent co-edited books are: (with Marina Nordera) Dance Discourses: Keywords in Dance Research (2007), Ricordanze. Memoria in movimento e coreografie della storia (2010) and The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Memory (forthcoming); (with Gabriella Giannachi) Moving Spaces: Rewriting Museology Through Practice (2021); (with Cristina Baldacci) On Reenactment: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools (forthcoming). She is the PI of the international research project ‘Memory in Motion: Re-Membering Dance History’ (www.mnemedance.com) (SPIN, 2019–2023 Ca’ Foscari) and she was the coordinator for Ca’ Foscari’s unit of Dancing Museums-The Democracy of Beings (2018–2021, Creative Europe). As a curator, she collaborates with Fondazione Querini Stampalia (Venice), Foundation Pinault-Palazzo Grassi (Venice), Lavanderia a Vapore (Turin) and she was in charge of the dance events for the Hangar Bicocca (Milan, 2009-2011).
TAHIA (Hélène, Tahiaueei) FALCHETTO, born and raised in Nuku-Hiva (Marquesas Islands), comes from a fishermen family. Her need for new horizons will lead her very early on to condition herself to leave, like someone in search of a holy grail. After high school in Tahiti, Tahia studied in France, her curiosity guided her choices and obtained a Master's degree in Marine Geology and a specialisation in Geographic Information System. Under the appearance of a common language, she discovers a very different culture and a deep acculturation from her own. Now vice-president of the Rochefort Pacific Cinema & Literature festival, she finds there a meeting and exchange space leading beyond clichés.
TUILOMA NERONI SLADE was one of the first elected Judges of the International Criminal Court and to take office in 2003 in The Hague, The Netherlands. Judge Slade has had an extensive career, internationally and in Samoa and the Pacific region: the first Samoan to be appointed as Attorney-General; senior counsel in the Legal Division of the Commonwealth Secretariat in London; Samoa’s Ambassador/Permanent Representative to the United Nations based in New York, and concurrently Ambassador to the USA and to Canada; and as Secretary General of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat based in Suva, Fiji. He continues to be engaged on international legal issues and on assignments in Samoa and the Pacific region.
X ZHU-NOWELL is a curator, writer, and institution leader who lives and works between New York and Shanghai. X Zhu-Nowell is currently the Assistant Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Consulting Curator at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. X Zhu-Nowell is invested in curatorial activities of varying scales, durations, and forms, responding to specific contexts and conditions. X Zhu-Nowell's recent collaborated artists include Wu Tsang, WangShui, Kandis Williams, Nick Cave, Jacolby Satterwhite, Tourmaline, Sin Wai Kin, Gillian Wearing, Merv Espina, Irena Haiduk, Adrián Villar Rojas, NZTT Sewing Co-Op, Hugh Hayden, Saodat Ismailova, Every Ocean Hughes, Farah Al Qasimi, Goutam Ghosh, Li Shuang, Jonathas de Andrade, Heman Chong among other. X Zhu-Nowell has lectured widely on exhibition histories and institutional practices (or the lack of), focusing on artist interventions in Asia.
YUKI KIHARA is an interdisciplinary artist whose work seeks to challenge dominant and singular historical narratives through a wide range of mediums, including performance, sculpture, video, photography and curatorial practice through a research-based approach. Kihara lives and works in Sāmoa, where she has been based over the past eleven years. Kihara is representing Aotearoa New Zealand at the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia 2022 with her critically acclaimed exhibition entitled Paradise Camp curated by Natalie King. Kihara is a research fellow at the National Museum of World Cultures, The Netherlands. https://yukikihara.ws
ZOI ALIOZI, is an international academic, scholar-activist currently teaching human rights, international law, philosophy, and climate justice at the EMA programme of the Global Campus of Human Rights in Venice, Italy. She is a human rights educator with climate justice specialism, and an award-winning philosopher. She is an inter-disciplinary scholar, with expertise in human rights law, analytic philosophy, climate justice, digital advocacy and distance learning. Her latest publications include: Human Rights: A Comparative Approach, (Eds. Z. Aliozi and K. Chainoglou, Hellenic Academic eBooks, Kallipos, Greece, Forthcoming 2022). "Green Criminology: A rights-based approach", in Green Crimes and International Criminal Law (Ed. R. Paulose, Vernon, USA, April 2021). "Diotima", in The Philosopher Queens (Eds. R. Buxton & L. Whiting, Unbound, UK, Sept. 2020).