ROSANNA Raymond cast a stern look across the room trying to will all the power of the traditional artefacts in their display casings at the Fiji Museum to share their stories and power and to share their history.
Her traditional Samoan female tattoos or malu seem to dominate the conversation for every line of ink is a testament to her passion.
She tried to master all the traditional iTaukei knowledge as she can and called on her own Samoan heritage and ancestry as she immersed herself into her pride — the Pacific culture.
She has been able to express into words what many Pacific islanders have only managed to preserve through their handiwork.
When she looks at a piece of masi (bark cloth), a war club or even the beautiful simplicity of a salusalu (leis), it calls out an identity forged through hundreds of years of migration, war, peace and existence of a unique culture.
Her case in point is the labels that many Pacific cultural works and heritage have attained or pinned with following its introduction into the western civilisation.
“I’ve often dealt with professional artists, it is another clunky western label which does not encompass the power, the mana, the prestige that’s our fa’amanaia it’s dormant.
“There’s a lot lost in translation but also there is a lot of our designers out there working with the western world, working in the fashion industry, making clothes to sell so to a western market but also for me its problematic, the way how we address our beautiful treasures that are not for sale and are still used in rituals and used to connect to our genealogical connections and our geographical connections.
“I make things myself I activate things I was finding it a bit clunky that you may call what I do a performance, it’s not a performance. I’m not performing my culture, I am actually activating the space between myself, my ancestors and I am representing that mana, I’m not doing a performance.
“So these are the sort of issues that a lot of our makers are interested in, things like every different masi, different liku (skirts) or sisi (necklaces) have different names so I think we should start and give more mana to the indigenous terms instead of always holding the privilege of holding the knowledge in the western construct,” Rosanna said.
She is part of the Fijian Art Research Project team based in the United Kingdom and which is trying its best to re-connect the Fijian communities, their artists and creators as well as academics with a definition of Pacific culture that defines its uniqueness.
The visiting Project team comprised Doctor Karen Jacobs from the University of East Anglia Rosanna and project administrator Katrina Igglesden.
Through a workshop where the project team shared their definition about what culture actually means in its raw context through the creation of works of art or simply in conversations and reflections of the ideas that shaped their handiworks.
“So in many ways, the workshop is bringing many different people together so they can talk and work and make and then we can share things that are important to us all but most of all to give an even platform for the voice of the academic, the voice of the maker and the voice of the indigenous body.
“For too long we have taken the body out and we’ve left all these beautiful things that have just turned into objects and artefacts and I find it quite distasteful and it doesn’t show the full picture so it’s really nice to start looking about how we can start re-addressing this.
“So we can actually see them and not be frightened of the past. It might be painful for some people to acknowledge certain aspects of their past but they should realize that is in the past we could move into the future and how this beautiful and powerful iyau (wealth), because it’s the wealth like our language, like our bodies how could all these be relevant in the 21st century and not just something that’s stuck in the past or something that we might be ashamed of because its associated with paganism … it’s really about finding a forum to talk about this,” Rosanna continued.
This will be expressed through a workshop and the exhibition where the themes are focused on the different aspects of traditional fashion, clothing and body adornment.
“We always see clothing in kind of a broad term, it’s not just dress but it’s also the adornments that shows the chief’s powers, the chiefs status, it’s the chiefs kali or headrest, and also figures which would have normally been significant or prestige but have lost their prestige to everyday use like the significance of masi, the exchange of gifts, dance clubs and dance fans and also how the clothes transforms the body, for example when a boy becomes a man, he wears his malo (loin cloth), when a girl becomes a woman, she gets a liku (skirt) and her tattoos,” Dr Jacobs said.
Their themes of the exhibition encompass the era of clothing before the arrival of the Europeans, after the arrival of the missionaries and right up to the modern Fiji Fashion Week styles and designs.
The project was started by Steven Hooper who is a specialist in traditional Fijian culture in the UK as he had lived among the Fijian people for some time.
“I think one of the main roles of the project is to disseminate as much knowledge about Fijian culture to a wider audience as possible and that includes the Fijian community here and also the very large Fijian community in the UK,” Dr Jacobs said.
“I think it’s his love for the Fijian people and the Fijian culture that has spurred him on to share the diversity and the strength and power, the mana of the Fijian (sort of) world,” Rosanna added.
“We all come to it from all different angles that really help this project, some of us come from museum background, some of us have anthropological background, some of us come from a bit of everything and some of us have other backgrounds,” Katrina said.
Katrina has maternal ties to Nukubalavu Village in Savusavu and so bringing the project home has meant a lot for her.
She considered it an honour for the project to be at the Fiji Museum, which stores the largest collection of traditional Fijian artefacts in the world.
