the wires are buried deep inside Tangaroa
Locations, art vs human, the fracture between the art economy and people, the careless way institutions are indebting young artists who are overqualified and underskilled, the narrative of white male artists as genius, buzzwords, false engagements, how to decolonise ur life in quick easy steps lol, decolonising the white cube, a romanticised notion of art as therapeutic, practice as catharsis, critiquing modes of production, exhaustion, illness, physical disasters, precarity, inherited mamae, the matrix of whiteness, performing an identity, disassociating/reassociating, 100 artworks you have to see before you die, artworks you experienced that altered your sense of the world, crying looking at a Monet/punching a Monet, fiction and reality as concepts on a spectrum not a binary, rationality vs emotion, boring abstract painting, the redundancy of art criticism, the friction of being both Pākehā and Māori, the history of tangata and whenua as one, how to find an identity again, you can have memories that are not yours, pairing words & art, who is art for, where does it belong, how to make work that isn’t an art school in-joke, the woman as narcissistic, who did the institution forget? how to be mixed, hybrid 101, being fractured into gestures or markers of a race, my body is a fraction, urgency and anxiety, disparate prose sitting next to each other, the destruction of water is the destruction of hapū, the biography of space, Google searching your ancestral lands, binaries are colonial constructs, cataloguing the self, western constructs of history, fact vs myth vs physical reality, i am all my ancestors and they are all me, survival tactics, how boring is a wall text? reassociating practice to life and death, intimacy, the end of it all, the taste of concrete dust in my sinuses.
The apocalypse is finally birthed from capitalism and we spiral into te kore, the void.
Ko te pū
Hine-nui-te-pō storms back into te ao from the kōpū of Papatūānuku, with obsidian teeth baring, to reclaim her time.
Te more
Rūaumoko stomps violently underground, and the hundreds of volcanoes across Aotearoa spew pyroclastic clouds into the sky and land.
Te weu
The marae stand, untouched.
Te aka
Mahuika scratches fire into acres of gentrification.
Te rea
Tearing embers from roads, she forms new pa sites and neighbourhoods.
Ko te wao nui
Rangi-nui weeps the sky on us, holding us in a liquid korowai of protection.
Te kune
The acres of wetlands which were drained by the English are replenished.
Te whē
The wires are buried deep inside Tangaroa,1 connecting oceans and dance floors to feed political and social rhizomes.
Te kore
Chords of filtering systems clear waterways from the pollution of unethical farming.
Te pō
The arteries of ancestral rivers are revived, estuaries are overcome with impenetrable mud and ngahere.
Ki ngā tangata Māori
The ongoing transfer of intergenerational knowledge is maintained through peer to peer networks. This knowledge is stored safely by each marae in microchips made from minute ocean algae.
Nā Rangi rāua ko Papa
Museums and galleries send the indigenous tāonga in their collections back to their rightful owners.
Ko tēnei te tīmatanga o te ao
Credit card debt is nullified.
Ko tēnei te tīmatanga o te ao
Māori life expectancy extends.
On a hilly pa, overlooking the ocean a poutama trellis of plastic and phone cables sway, waving in the wind on the atea.2 The colonial masters are sent home, on the last four ships.1 Piu-Piu Maya Turei, Karakia (2016).
2 Jacqueline Fraser Matakitaki at Otakou marae (1993). Matakitaki loosely translates to ‘the view’.
Mya Morrison-Middleton (Ngāi Tūāhuriri) is a writer, curator and DJ based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. She plays deconstructed club bangers under the name GG with her boo Brown Boy Magik. She is a member of Fresh and Fruity alongside Hana Pera Aoake, an indigenous art collective with a multidisciplinary practice. Her own writing practice attempts to form a praxis for imagining a future oriented narrative of indigenous sovereignty. Somehow she’s scammed her way into theatre and recently presented a play during Matariki at Basement Theatre.
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