Performance: Léuli Eshrāghi

tagata a nuʻu poʻo tagata a faguʻu (2022)

The performance installation, tagata a nuʻu poʻo tagata a faguʻu (2022), literally meaning ‘people of the villages or people of bottled oil’ in Sāmoan, is a contemporary faʻamalama (offering to ancestors, spirits and guardian spirits). Through a performance score in Sāmoan, French and English, the artist moves through an alofisā (ceremonial circle) of coconut water bottles, echoing the form around which all customary architecture in the Sāmoan islands is expressed. Commercially available coconut water tetra-packs are present here in order to actively consider vā (spatial, multidirectional relationships) with human and beyond-human kin. Each coconut water tetra-pack represents a year of cumulative Gregorian shame-time imposed on all kinds of bodies, sexualities and kinships since 1830 when John Williams brought the civilising mission to the artist’s ancestral archipelago of multiple animist chiefdoms. Blue fluoro lights haunt the present with faiga faʻakolonē (colonial structure), the unfinished business of German, American and British empires.

The golden sheen present on the artist’s hips references the healing properties of electrolyte-rich coconut water, that effectively hide the nefarious effects of monocrop plantations across the global south, in a system of abstraction of responsibility that the artist terms hydrodecadence. This 2022 iteration of the performance installation foregrounds the enjoyment of sensuality in the context of sacred relationships between the coconut tree (understood through the figure of Tuna) with humans sustained by lands and waters enjoying balance (understood through the figure of Sina). Immersed in a sonic composition created on ʻUpolu island by sibling artist Tiafau Nadeem Eshraghi, the artist endeavours to move beyond intersecting forms of domination of body, land, mind and water, to ecocritical states of softness, plurality, and pleasure.

Across iterations, this work has been supported by SAVVY Contemporary, Bleach Festival, Performatorium: Festival of Queer Performance, Sharjah Art Foundation, Watch This Space, Para Site, Open Space, Paradise Cove Collective, and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. Léuli thanks for their critical sonic, poetic and gestural contributions to this work’s development: Tiafau Nadeem Eshraghi, Kelly Krugman, Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, Arlette-Louise Ndakoze, Rosanna Raymond, Ricky Tagaban, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, Peter Morin, Tania Willard, Sone Eshrāghi, Yara El-Ghabdan, Louis-Karl Sioui-Picard, Angela Tiatia, Tyson Campbell, Julia Packard, Doug Jarvis, France Trépanier, Lee Sum Yi, Qu Chang, and Zoe Butt.

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Images courtesy of SAVVY Contemporary, Sharjah Art Foundation, Zoe Butt, Laura Metzler, Zoya Godoroja-Prieckaerts, Clayton Windatt