Solo, or Samoan chants, are enigmatic poems encoded with real historical events to relay the creation of the world. They are thought to have originated from the first utterings of the creator Tagaloa-a-lagi. The chants are sung from one generation to the next, with each generation having to decode the epic poem in embellishments through fagogo (storytelling), allowing new characters and situations to come to life and become part of an ongoing narrative. In this way the creator Tagaloa-a-lagi gets propelled into the present by the continual reanimation and recirculation of the tale. The notion of origin in Samoan and Polynesian thinking is not, therefore, a phenomenon that relegates the ancestors to a mythical past, but that sees them as continually available and located within one’s body. This is where the concept of the va originates.

In his poem Inside Us the Dead, the Samoan poet Albert Wendt intimated that our bodies are woven from the flesh of the ancestors and that we are impregnated with potentiality, va, the oceanic-an opening. As a result, we are the latest models or circulations of the ancestors, and our responsibility is this: to make the ancestors arrive in the present. That is why relationships are especially important, and why they are referred to as va: because we see in others (whether beings, objects, or the natural environment) a potential that is deep, like the ocean swells inside us.

Rosanna Raymond demonstrates this with vigour and grace in her work Cling to the Sea (2010) in the exhibition Border Zones: New Art across Cultures. The work raises issues crucial to understanding a tension that often surfaces, under the guise of cross-cultural expression, between the traditional and contemporary in art. Rosanna’s work is valuable because it dares to sit firmly at the crossroads of traditional and contemporary art practice, trying to resolve this tension without elevating one over the other or proposing cynical strategies to delay their perceived, inevitable collision. She works through and honours both; it could be said that she tries to balance them. Some might see this as a weakness. In my view, the attempt at balance is what gives her work strength, because it honours the traditional role of women’s art in Polynesia, which was not about valorising conflict, but to make art Teu le va—sing and celebrate relationships.

Cling to the Sea employs, as a starting point, a Samoan tapa-printing board or upeti collected by Frank Burnett between 1895 and 1927, and part of the Museum’s founding collection. Rosanna Raymond reignites fai’aiga (a familial bond) with the upeti by paying homage to the thing itself with a performance and offerings of fine mats and urban Pasifika streetwear from Auckland, New Zealand. Like a seed that has lain dormant for over a century, the upeti needed to be given a wanaga or va‘aga—a new revolution of va—and be acknowledged with a chant by a storyteller so that it would once again become a link in the chain of life. This essay, too, is part of this chain of relations.

Storytelling traditionally involved the voice and gestures performed in a shared space, and upeti were initially designed to produce ata (shadows) that were literally cast as patterns onto sacred siapo (cloths) worn by elevated women like taupou (ceremonial virgins). Rosanna’s retelling has to deal with a different kind of revolution of time in the museum: a connected space of global sameness and difference. The result is what I would like to call a reanimation, because the upeti has been sung into an image-dominated time and into a space where time has been literally woven with the images themselves, making it an (e)motion picture. This is the experience of the installation, where on one hand images of tapa cloths are projected as ‘patterns that connect,’ identifying and weaving relations with which Polynesians are so familiar and comfortable, while the poem sings a narrative with two or maybe three voices (subject positions of the poem) connecting ancestors, the ocean, sky, the animate world, and woman as the beginning and end.

Cling to the Sea gives the upeti a new currency that reroutes the once dormant seed, making it connect with the multiple networks that crisscross and lacerate the discourse of decolonisation, the postcolonial, and the cross cultural. This is a new kind of va relationship that tries to make new relations from tensions between things once based on village or nuu local polity to what is now a global urban and cosmopolitan shared space. It sees value in relationships and shared experiences and musings between dusky maidens, museums, ancestors, urban savages, and patterns that, like rhizomes, cut across borders, building links and connecting stories.

Albert Refiti is a Pacific art and architectural theorist based in Auckland, New Zealand; he is currently a senior lecturer and head of the Department of Spatial Design at Auckland University of Technology.

Rosanna Raymond in her performance, SaVAge K’lub, at the Museum of Anthropology, 26 January 2010.
Photos by Ken Mayer