The three-day in-person talanoa in Venice organized by Yuki Kihara has been developed in close partnership with Francesca Tarocco, Director of THE NEW INSTITUTE Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE), art historian Cristina Baldacci (Ca’ Foscari University) and curator Natalie King (University of Melbourne and curator of Paradise Camp presented at the New Zealand Pavilion).
By engaging with the urgent themes of the Paradise Camp exhibition, the talanoa will explore the intertwinements of artistic, legal, writing and curatorial perspectives on this socially engaged and multifaceted project; to how artists, curators, and scholars unsettle the boundaries between art and ethnography by highlighting reparation and restitution practices; and a discussion around the theme of water in its multiple material, social, legal and political forms, including attributing legal personhood to water ecologies.
The in-person talanoa in Venice is presented in collaboration with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and with Fondazione Querini Stampalia.
Download full programme HERE.
PROGRAM
Tuesday 11th October 2022
Time: 11.30am – 1pm
Duration: 90min
Location: La Biennale di Venezia - Arsenale, New Zealand pavilion / Campo de la Tana, Castello 2169/f, Venice (MAP)
Participants are to buy their own tickets
Title: Paradise Camp panel discussion
Speakers include:
Yuki Kihara (Artist of Paradise Camp at the NZ Pavilion), Alex Su’a (Sāmoa Fa’afafine Association), Ioana Gordon Smith (NZ Pavilion), Natalie King (NZ Pavilion/University of Melbourne), moderated by Wonu Veys (National Museum of World Cultures, The Netherlands) and Cristina Baldacci (Ca ‘Foscari).
Description: During the opening session of the Talanoa Forum, panellists will discuss the concept of Paradise Camp in the Aotearoa New Zealand pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Shot and filmed on location in Upolu Island, Sāmoa, the project reflects on the injuries of colonialism and patriarchal structures, especially in relation to the Fa'afafine community, as well as to broader western misconceptions of the Pacific. Kihara’s deployment of various tactics will be discussed, such as humour as a weapon, pathos and politics. The speakers will engage in a conversation, crossing artistic, legal, writing and curatorial perspectives on this complex work discussing how many people and communities were involved behind the scenes, and the multiple stories underpinning Paradise Camp.
Link: Not available online.
Time: 1pm – 3pm / Lunch and travel time
Location: Ca' Dolfin, Aula Magna Silvio Trentin, Calle Larga Ca’ Foscari, Dorsoduro 3825/D, Venice (MAP)
Time: 3 – 4:30pm
Duration: 90min
Title: Gauguin: reflections. He whakaaro whakawahine: for years I have looked at those faces and wondered. Who were they, really?
Speakers include:
Welcome and Introductory remarks: Rector Tiziana Lippiello, Francesca Tarocco (Director, NICHE), Shaul Bassi (NICHE/Director of the Master’s Degree Program in Environmental Humanities, Ca’ Foscari University)
Lead Speaker: Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Professor Emerita and Ruānuku/Venerable Elder Scholar of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, New Zealand’s Māori Centre for Research Excellence.
Panellists: Environmental Humanities Students and Shaul Bassi (Chair)
Description: Over many centuries, the South Seas captured the western imagination. The arrival of voyagers, star gazers, gentlemen scholars, traders and soul savers on our scattered islands captured the interest of our ancestors. Exchange, both destructive and benevolent, occured, and that engagement continues.
But on whose terms?
In 2022, the terms of engagement are shifting. The islanders, the indigenous, are asserting own voice - creatively, intellectually, historically. We challenge the western record, and its arrogant self authorisation. We comment and reflect with the integrity of the lived and living expertise, and the remembered and remembering experience. We record who we are, where we have come from, and what we know.
It is a simple knowing. We see the figures shining from a painted surface by Gauguin, and we recognise real people. Ancestors. Tupuna. Ours. More than mere models; they are our forebears. And they live on, in us.
Gauguin, and his contemporaries, by their image making and their recorded writings, attempted to collect, preserve and authorise what they saw, what they experienced. Their day, and the day of their intellectual heirs, is over.
Kihara takes control of these images, asserting an elemental relationship with their content – the landscape, the figures, the stories - through her narrative of reclamation and recognition which sets up Paradise Camp.
Thus telling us all, who they were, really.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVo3Y1gKRmc
Location: Ca' Dolfin, Aula Magna Silvio Trentin, Calle Larga Ca’ Foscari, Dorsoduro 3825/D, Venice (MAP)
Time: 4:30 – 5:30pm
Duration: Round table: 60min
Title: Making Representations
Speakers include:
Chantal Spitz (NZ Pavilion), Miriama Bono (Museum of Tahiti), Tahia Falchetto (Festival Rochefort Pacifique Cinéma & Littérature), moderated by Erna Lije (National Museum of World Cultures, The Netherlands). Translation support by Wonu Veys (National Museum of World Cultures, The Netherlands).
Description: This panel will explore the terrain of representation and misrepresentation by using Paradise Camp as a prompt. The session will uncover the complexities of representation across social, historical, political, activist and cultural realms. Yuki Kihara’s Paradise Camp deploys representation as an act of reclamation, defiance and celebration allowing the speakers to consider how representation can be inverted and challenged from the perspective of the Global South.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVo3Y1gKRmc
Time: 5:30 – 7pm
Duration: 90 mins
Location: Ca' Dolfin, Aula Magna Silvio Trentin, Calle Larga Ca’ Foscari, Dorsoduro 3825/D, Venice (MAP)
Title: Welcome drinks, courtesy of The Ministry of Pacific Peoples of the Government of New Zealand.
Wednesday 12th October 2022
Time: 10 – 11.30am
Duration: 90min
Location: Aula Baratto, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Dorsoduro 3246 (MAP)
Title: Art and Ethnography
Speakers include:
Yuki Kihara (NZ Pavilion) and Cristina Baldacci (Ca ‘Foscari) in conversation, followed by Q&A
Description: The talanoa between Yuki Kihara and Cristina Baldacci considers how Kihara’s Paradise Camp brings together art and ethnography through the process of ‘upcycling’ to imagine a ‘Fa’afafine utopia’. How can colonial imagery, ethnographic objects and depictions be creatively challenged and reactivated to tell new stories? Conventions of archiving tend to centralise intellectual resources, and make them fixed and authoritative. Another kind of archiving can generate open repositories that grow organically and unpredictably. In these initiatives, histories are re-enacted and revised through strategies of dispersal, play, translation, migration, fermentation, contestation and disintegration.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzanPYtZSX4
Time: 11.45am – 1pm
Location: Aula Baratto, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Dorsoduro 3246 (MAP)
Duration: Roundtable: 75min
Title: Art and Ethnography
Speakers include:
X Zhu-Nowell (Solomon R Guggenheim), Nicholas Thomas (Museum of Archeology and Antrophology, Cambridge), Franca Tamisari (Ca ‘Foscari), Natalie King (NZ Pavilion/University of Melbourne) , moderated by Susanne Franco (Ca ‘Foscari).
Description: This session invites speakers to have a round table talanoa using the conversation between Yuki Kihara and Cristina Baldacci as a prompt to explore how art and material culture can contribute to the decolonization of both art and ethnographic museums. What methodologies can be deployed to destabilize the binary where ethnographic institutions are often perceived as being ‘historical’ whereas art institutions are considered ‘contemporary’? How can we imagine a museological practice that is inclusive and respectful of the past while caring for artists and objects? How can material culture have agency and can knowledge of the past be propagated without being institutionalised?
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzanPYtZSX4
1pm - 3pm / Lunch & travel time
Time: 3 – 5 pm (Arrival at 2:45pm for the tour to begin at 3pm)
Location: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Dorsoduro, 701-704
Entry: By invitation only.
Duration: 120min
Title: Peggy Guggenheim’s Oceanic collections
Speakers include:
Wonu Veys (National Museum of World Cultures, The Netherlands)
Description: Tour of Peggy Guggenheim’s Oceanic collections led by Wonu Veys will highlight objects from a Pacific perspective, upending the conventional European narrative.
Link: Not available online.
Thursday 13th October 2022
Location: Aula Baratto, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Dorsoduro 3246 (MAP)
Time: 10 – 11.10am
Duration: 70min
Topic: Turning the Tide: Indigenous water beings and multi-species democracy
Speakers include:
Lead Speaker: Veronica Strang (Durham) Chair: David Gentilcore (NICHE)
Panelists: Students of the Master’s Program in Environmental Humanities
Description: In contemporary debates about water and rights, Indigenous water beings, such as rainbow serpents and taniwha, have a vital role in expressing the co-creative agency of the non-human domain alongside human rights to water. Drawing on case studies in New Zealand and Australia, this lecture explores how engaging with these powerful ancestral beings can transform dialogues about water rights, law and personhood. It considers their potential to challenge anthropocentric legal frameworks and to promote new and more inclusive forms of multi-species democracy.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNjzZY0fBis
Time: 11.20am - 1.00pm
Location: Aula Baratto, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Dorsoduro 3246 (MAP)
Duration: Round table: 100min
Topic: Personhood and Water Bodies: Cosmological and Legal Frameworks
Speakers include:
Silvia Francescon (Italian Buddhist Union); Zoi Aliozi (Global Campus for Human Rights); Sara De Vido (Ca' Foscari University); Pietro Consolandi (Ocean Space), Massimo Warglien (NICHE/Ca' Foscari University), Lelei Lelaulu (Chair of the Earth Council), Pietro Omodeo (Ca' Foscari University). Moderated by Francesca Tarocco (NICHE/Ca' Foscari University)
Description: How do we release rivers, seas, lakes and other bodies of water from the depredations of the Anthropocene epoch? How do we begin to disentangle the sea from the legal fiction of the ‘offshore’? How do we connect ecosystems through the entire water column—from the Southern Ocean to the Arctic Sea—in order to keep them healthy? How do we think of seamounts as ‘gardens of the oceans’ with their own living communities of sentient beings? Speakers explore water commons, personhood and multispecies democracy from an interdisciplinary, Indigenous and judicial perspective. This panel will also expand on the ideas and themes discussed in the previous online talanoa on Thursday 29th September 2022, and is part of a year of research focused on water at NICHE.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNjzZY0fBis
1pm – 3pm / Lunch and travel
Time: 3 – 4pm
Location: Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Campo Santa Maria Formosa, 5252 (MAP)
Speakers Include:
Chiara Bertola, Curator of Contemporary Art Program at Fondazione Querini Stampalia
Description: Visit to Fondazione Querini Stampalia.
Link: Not available online.
6:30pm (by invitation only)
“Paradise Camp” book launch and discussion
Speakers include:
Kirsten Abbott (Thames & Hudson); Natalie King (NZ Pavilion/University of Melbourne); Chantal Spitz (Mā’ohi (Tahitian) writer); Ioana Gordon Smith (NZ Pavilion) and. Yuki Kihara (NZ Pavilion).