About
The Project: 'you need our eyes to see us'
Our project responded to the concept ‘How would you reconcile historical objects with contemporary stories in a multisensory way?’ The curators we were paired with provided us with photos of some of the objects in their Oceania collection. We responded to these objects - we call them rather treasures in our own languages - as poets, by writing a suite of poems called 'you need our eyes to see us'.
The poems are like love letters or conversations, wonderings and memories. We understood that we needed not only to provide the museum with a bunch of poems we wrote, but also allow them access to the finer points of our inner decision making as indigenous artists. Why would we write poems instead of doing any one of a million other possibilities? What does poetry from indigenous writers bring into this context that traditional museum methods don’t? Why did we make each of the micro decisions we made that led to the creation of ‘you need our eyes to see us’? The logic model or prototype that we decided upon with Abhay’s guidance is that of ‘poetry as metadata.’ From the data that currently exists about these treasures, we might learn where they came from, from whom and by whom they were acquired, when they were made, which materials they were made from. Often we only know one of these things. Our poetry provides other meaningful data: the intangible; genealogical Pohnpeian / Māori perspectives; indigenous language; place names; origin stories (real or questioned); in other words, our poems flesh out the emotional, genealogical and cultural context of these treasures and the violence of their separation from their communities.
To us as indigenous people, these precious objects are not, and never have been, stationary, dead or passive. They always and already resonate and vibrate with the mauri, the life force, the energy of those who made them and those who continue to love and miss them. In our poems we imagine them learning; we speak and write them into remembering and conversing with each other and with the museum visitors, with us and even with the glass cases which contain them.
Kalahngan en kupwuramwail! Tena tatou katoa, thank you all for your attention!
The Prototype: 'ynoetsu'
ynoetsu is an interactive collection of poems presented as mixed media pieces in a video format.
The audience is taken on a journey browsing phrases from the poems. These phrases and words are used as metadata. Output is in the form of generative semi-random mixed media. Each piece has multiple versions of media mixed and sliced, such as: text, author's voice, ambient sound, video of the author and the environment where the objects from the collection are coming from. Presented works are focused on emotional impact. Pseudo-randomness bypasses hierarchy and provides a unique experience to the audience.
Artists
Emelihter Kihleng
Emelihter is a curator, scholar and poet with a focus on textiles from her home island of Pohnpei in Micronesia. Her recent and current projects include co-curating Urohs Fever for the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) at the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane, Australia; a year spent as the first Curatorial Research Fellow, Oceania at the MARKK Museum am Rothenbaum in Hamburg; and co-editing the first anthology of indigenous writing from Micronesia, published by University of Hawaiʻi Press in 2019. She is currently a Native Arts Fellow at the Denver Art Museum in Colorado, USA.
Hinemoana Baker
Hinemoana is a writer, researcher, recording and performance artist from Aotearoa New Zealand. She links ancestrally to Māori tribes in the North and South Island, as well as to settlers from England, Germany (Oberammergau, Bayern) and Australia. Her creative projects include several albums of original music and experimental sound, as well as four published collections of poetry, the most recent of which, 'Funkhaus', was a finalist for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She lives in Berlin, Germany, and is currently completing a PhD at Potsdam University.
Radek Rudnicki
Audiovisual experience designer, sound and new media artist. He received international funding and awards and is regularly invited to conferences and art residencies. Radek collaborated with NASA’s GISS, SpaceBase, New Zealand and Stockholm Environment Institute on projects linking art, science and technology, which he presented in the USA, Europe and New Zealand. In his works he emphasises a varied range of digital art, including algorithmic composition, free improvisation and re-contextualisation of traditional music using electronics. His projects were presented on events such as Tokyo Festival of Modular; Stockholm Tech Fest; New Frontiers, New Zealand; London Jazz Festival; elbPhilharmonie, Hamburg; Copernicus Science Centre, Warsaw Poland.
Licensing
ynoetsu by Emelihter Kihleng, Hinemoana Baker, Radek Rudnicki, Abhay Adhikari and Übersee-Museum Bremen is licensed under CC BY SA 4.0.
This prototype was developed as part of the NEO Collections project.
