Featured Artist:
Léuli Eshrāghi // Performance and Artist Talk (FREE)
TROMSø
Performance and Artist Talk (FREE)
- Location: Tromsø Kunstforening - Romssa Dáiddasiida (Mellomvegen 82)
- Date: Saturday, May 2
- Times: Performance @ 15:00 // Artist talk @ 15:45
PERFORMANCE
Les solaires
Akin to the ula, shell necklaces gathered along the coasts, and ʻafa, robust coconut husk strands braided together to lash and strengthen vessels and architectures conceived as renewable in the absolute humidity of warm contexts, th hub is new performance work considers queer Indigenous lives and afterlives at home and at sea. Les solaires dissects Norwegian voyager Thor Heyerdahl’s contributions to colonial understandings of Indigenous historicity and futurity in the Great Ocean and the Americas, as ostensibly unable to recognize or accept gender, kinship, pleasure, knowledge, and society structured beyond binaries and race hierarchies.
Through this work that humbly seeks to string Romssa/Tromsø, Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, and ʻUpolu islands, Léuli shares a prayer to ancestors known and floating through colonial archives just beyond the veil of remembrance while processing dried and roasted cacao from their homelands; and an offering to precolonial spirits too-long forsaken at home through unwrapping and rewrapping dried fish in pāreu made of mylar. A rehearsal imagining ancestral ceremonial-political practice across thousands of years prior to forced christianization, monotheization, monogamization and capitalist accumulation from 1830 in the Sāmoan archipelago, Les solaires is equally a future-focused consideration of cumlines, ancestral epics, and spiritual practices that imbue the present with possibility and wonder.