Rosanna Raymond
Her Eyes on the Horizon and Other (un)Exotic Tales from Beyond the Reef
• 144 • In the Balance Drifting amid the debris of frigid clouds Atua … fall from the trees
Selected, Resurrected, Revitalized, Realized, Revibed Reconstituted in an Aural Actuality
Though I am not talking to them today
They can just have a physical presence and keep quiet in the background
……… blending in with the constant babble of London town Excerpt from ‘Godless Daze’
Her Eyes on the Horizon and Other (un)Exotic Tales from Beyond the Reef
Fig. 1 Matariki Celebration UK SaVAge Portrait Series.
Acti.VA.tor, Fabricator: Rosanna Raymond. Photo: Salvador Brown, 2014.
• 146 • In the Balance
Why are First Nation peoples and ‘indigenousness’ usually associated with a static rootedness to a place? I think about the movement of people, the circulation of bodies, trade, reciprocal relationships, knowledge, and legacies steeped in historical ties, not just whakapapa (genealogy) or a fixed notion of a homeland that can confine people to a particular time and space, making it easier for the indigenous to be excluded from the global and the contemporary … framing us in the past.
Her Eyes on the Horizon and Other (un)Exotic Tales from Beyond the Reef
Fig. 2. SaVAge Wares.
Acti.VA.tor: Kimiora Burrows (Ngati Maru, Ngati Porou and Aitutaki).
Fabricator: Rosanna Raymond. Photo: Kerry Brown, 2013.
• 148 • In the Balance
We can’t push the hands of time back but we can empower people by ensuring that all histories are told and have equal mana (presence and power). The SaVAge K’lub presents twenty-first-century South Sea SaVAgery, influencing art and culture through the interfacing of time and space, deploying weavers of words, rare anecdotalists, myth makers, hip shakers, navigators, red faces, fabricators, activators, to institute the non-cannibalistic cognitive consumption of the other. It’s a space where I try to decolonize mind, body and soul.
Her Eyes on the Horizon and Other (un)Exotic Tales from Beyond the Reef
Fig 3 Inaugural Acti.VA.tion for the UK SaVAge K’lub, founded by Rosanna Raymond. Commonwealth Day theme, ‘Women as Agents of Change’, celebrating the 63rd birthday of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
Marlborough House, London, 2011.
Fabricators, Acti.VA.tors: Jo Walsh, Emine Jones-Burke. Photo: Kerry Brown.
• 150 • In the Balance
My peers recognize fibres, tusks, teeth, movements, chants, tatau, patterns, sounds … these are not exotic to me – this is your exotic … framed by the West. To me exotic is something used for fruits or birds … animals … and pole dancers. I am none of these.
Her Eyes on the Horizon and Other (un)Exotic Tales from Beyond the Reef
Fig. 4 The Dusky Aint Dead She’s Just Diversified-Rave On Maiden Acti.VA.tor: Rosanna Raymond. Fabricators: Amanda Luise Barnes and Rosanna
Raymond. Photo: Kerry Brown, 2009.
• 152 • In the Balance See Through Me
I am the invisible woman, with invisible people inside me. I come from an invisible land, nurtured by an invisible sea. I have an invisible past, with an invisible crown of tusks on my invisible head. I wear invisible tattoos they cover my invisible body. I am crying invisible tears, they leave an invisible trail of salinity.
It has been said, we cry the sea, so you don’t have to worry, the salt-water people will look after me.
So here I sit with invisible men so black I get lost in their skin, their voices sound like old stones turning into gravel
They look through me
I am just an invisible rock, rising from that invisible sea That’s ok … we just trying to survive the city.
Poem written on the 68 bus in London
Her Eyes on the Horizon and Other (un)Exotic Tales from Beyond the Reef
Fig. 5 Would the Real Tusk Please Stand Up
Acti.VA.tor, Fabricator: Rosanna Raymond. Photo: Kerry Brown, 2014.
• 154 • In the Balance Long God
A long god is digging his way into soft skin taking with him 9 layers
of heavens and a cycle of reciprocal obligation sit is my job
to make the ava and sit by his side he digs deeper
and I get caught in the stars there is no flesh involved just skin
he tells me to drink the ava but the stars say ‘no’
I am just there to serve and sit by his side
that is why they tattooed me
Poem written on train to Normandy, 2014
Her Eyes on the Horizon and Other (un)Exotic Tales from Beyond the Reef
Fig. 6 Pe’a.
Acti.VA.tor, Fabricator: Rosanna Raymond. Tohunga ta moko: Inia Taylor, Te Rangitu Netana, Rangi Kipper, Tufuga Malu: Croc, Paulo and Petalo Suluape.
Photo: Kerry Brown, 2014.
• 156 • In the Balance
I will sing to her, the very existence of the world … not a scientific rendering nor will it involve any sort of preacher.
from ‘Observational Outlooks through the DNA of the Atua Tagaloa’
Her Eyes on the Horizon and Other (un)Exotic Tales from Beyond the Reef
Fig. 7 Masi Maidens – Masi Vulavula (detail)
Acti.VA.tor, Fabricator: Rosanna Raymond. Photo: Greg Semu, Alcaston Gallery, 2013.
• 158 • In the Balance Cling to the sea
And I’ll stay here and hide on the moon Gaze away
Dream your exotic dreams … and I’ll excrete the seamen that came to visit me
They flew in double-hulled canoes, through the heavens Tracing the celestials in the coconut altitudes
Excerpt from ‘Cling to the Sea’
Her Eyes on the Horizon and Other (un)Exotic Tales from Beyond the Reef
Fig. 8. Soli I Tai – Soli I Uta (Tread on the Sea – Tread on the Land), Berlin Museum of Ethnology, 2013.
Acti.VA.tor: Rosanna Raymond. Intervention facilitated by the Indigeneity in the Contemporary World project. Photo: Tallie Renouf, 2014.
• 160 • In the Balance Nafanua born of a blood clot …
I am the living representation of the ancestors; they live through me and I through them. I am the progeny of Nafanua, warrior goddess, born of a blood clot, sheltered in the land, an inspiration to me. We walk barefoot so as not to hurt the mother earth, the mana of the Moana adorns me as I bring the ancestral presence to the heart of the business district in London. Wry smiles greet us – they are clothed in empire I am clothed in ceremony.
Her Eyes on the Horizon and Other (un)Exotic Tales from Beyond the Reef
Fig. 9 Nafanua’s Daytrip.
Acti.VA.tor: Rosanna Raymond. Intervention at Canary Wharf, London, facilitated by Indigeneity in the Contemporary World project. Photo: Simon
Owen, Red Photographic, 2013.
During his opening night welcoming remarks for the 2011 Native American Film + Video Festival (NAFVF) at the Smithsonian Institution, the Cayuga actor and director Gary Farmer, the host of the festival, greeted the spectators by reading a list of participating tribes: ‘Tonight we are honouring 76 Native Nations, tribes, communities, represented in this year’s festival: Acoma Pueblo. Akuntsu. Algonquin. Anishinaabe.
Chiricahua Apache…’1 This moment performed hemispheric inclusiveness, demonstrating a turn from the festival’s early focus on North American film traditions. It exposed the usually Anglophonic ‘accented’ MC to friendly correctives shouted out by audiences from the tribes mentioned, turning a singular, solemn speech into a dialogic, multivocal ritual that indigenized the space. Such moments, rare in the hush of mainstream film festival openings, are typical of an Indigenous film event. The irruption of dialogic oral tradition breaks through carefully scripted speeches held in elegant buildings, turning rote opening remarks into collective perfor-mances in themselves.
The space of the Indigenous film festival – where creative works reach diverse audiences and film-makers interact with their peers, collaborators and supporters – is a central theoretical and performative site for articu-lating and theorizing Indigenous media movements. Such gatherings constitute shifting circuits that mediate among diverse cultural, social and political forces. This essay examines seminal festivals that have played decisive roles in shaping the field of Indigenous cinema, reworking traditional exhibition mores and bringing democratizing and Indigenous methodologies to bear on circulation practices. Building on geograph-ically dispersed studies of the use of audiovisual media in Latin American Indigenous struggles for self-representation,2 I trace the ways in which