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Léuli Eshrāghi // Performance and Artist Talk (FREE)

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PERFORMANCE

tagata a nuʻu poʻo tagata a faguʻu

The performance installation, tagata a nuʻu poʻo tagata a faguʻu, literally meaning ‘people of the villages or people of bottled oil’ in gagana Sāmoa, 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 electrolyterich 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. The iterations of the performance installation spanning 2017 to today foreground 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 Aupuni Space, TRADES A.i.R., Laila Twigg Smith Art Fund, SAVVY Contemporary, Bleach Festival, Performatorium Festival of Queer Performance / Queer City Cinema, 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: Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick, Zoe Butt, Tyson Campbell, Yara El- Ghabdan, Marika Emi, Sone Eshrāghi, Tiafau Nadeem Eshraghi, Doug Jarvis, Kelly Krugman, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, Lee Sum Yi, Madi, Peter Morin, Arlette-Louise Ndakoze, Julia Packard, Qu Chang, Rosanna Raymond, Louis-Karl Sioui-Picard, Ricky Tagaban, Angela Tiatia, France Trépanier, Gary Varro, Tania Willard.