KEY REMINDER IMPORTANCES: BRIEF

The exhibition aims to create a dynamic, welcoming and functional space as a platform for encounters: “exhibitions, conversations, performances, gatherings, screenings and teachings.”

Encounters: What I think encounters mean? to engage with something, to meet and be introduced too or into. Encounters are usually personal or with a group. You sometimes encounter objects collectively. I feel like spatially encounters should be new and fresh something that should be introduced to us. Engaging with something new and different. To see beyond or step into something intimately. Which should include exhibits, conversations, performances, gatherings, screenings, teachings.

Contamination as Collaboration: 

Contamination as Collaboration is a reading in which I was given to read for my minor class which is contemporary pacific. Which I feel may have resonance towards the current studio brief?. My minor class has really exposed me to a lot of contemporary work and exhibitions, politics, colonialism, post-colonial body, history, culture etc..

 Tsing, A. (2015), The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press

” I wanted someone to tell e things were going to fine, but no one did.” – Mai Neug Mona, “Along the way to the Mekong”

My Review: The way in which the author has viewed contamination as collaboration seemed as though the idea is very much connecting, spreading, developing and growing. It seems to be more of a deepened and broad context than food. It’s as if one factor needs another and the other needs support to maintain a cycle or maybe showing us that this may have been the result of our collaborative mistakes. The author quoted ” We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who were are as we make way for others.” was quite clear, seeing this in active form we become contaminated unknowingly as well, not disease but communication and thought, intention and maybe this contaminant allowed this diversity and history. The little unseen moments we don’t take awareness of. I think individualist are contaminated, they are caused by self contamination, but is there self contamination based on their encounter based collaboration?. Its makes the viewer become reflective. Contamination is quite terrifying to mention,ts something that is poisonous, hazardous, polluting. but collaboration, seems quite toxic to gather in. How successful has it been politically? culturally? Morally? How hard it must be for our now society to have intake on this. Theres a huge contrast between this text and a text we do today. It simplifies the reality.

“How can the gallery, as a place and space, “ARTICULATE THROUGH ARRANGEMENT NARRATIVE AND SPATIALIZATION”

How do interior surfaces speak?: Depends on what the materiality is and its texture or its possibilities? Deterioration of a surface, the freshness of the surface, placement or the fidgetiness of the outcome of the surface, finger prints, marks left from any other contact? What is left on the surface, what is forgotten?

How are cultural stories and forces inscribed(marked with characters) in the surfaces around us?:

The Art of Tatauing – or more correctly, the way of life that is tatauing- had to survive the “onslaught the missionary condemnation and colonialism?.

-Pain of Tatau is a endurance to prepare for life, it recognises its growth maturity and ability to serve the community.

One example could be the essay written by Albert Wendt in which I was introduced too by my minor class which was contemporary pacific. The essay is quite humorous and more fluidly understood. Because the author is Samoan theres an ownership in which I hugely respect. Albert Wendt sees post colonial body as a becoming or defining itself. The body being submerged in a blend of local and nationalism that is influenced from outside and within. A body defining itself. coming out of the pacific, not a body being imposed on the Pacific. He identifies this post colonial body by seeing a well built Samoan guy walking down queen street with blue sport shorts, blue t-shirt with cropped hair, reeboks, eating a hamburger and showing his tatau off. Reflectively, growing up my parents are both Samoan but both brought us up differently which I realise now what all the bickering was about. Both my parents are total opposites, both born and raised in Samoa and yet both individually brought us up differently. My mother disliked the Fa’a Samoan way so she brought us up in the “palagi way”, whereas my dad lives the Fa’a Samoan way and he tried to teach us about it, but us kids became too palagi that it was too late. But I would say there has been a shift, my dad cleans and looks after the house and has taken the female role, and my mum works and provides, which is a huge shift.

How has this interplay manifested historically? What novelties and continuities are there in contemporary articulation of surface and orality? How has this interplay manifested historically?

The Gallery as a space of power: What do non- colonial and non-patriarchal spaces feel like?

” The agenda was to make the ‘public’ understand themselves as “both the subjects of knowledge” through the creation of a “set of cultural technologies concerned to organise a voluntary self-regulating citizenry” (Bennett 1996, 84)

” Speaking Surfaces responds to these histories of social control”

Social Control? What are we now sharing or exhibiting in galleries, or art spaces? Why is there a control over exhibitions? Are we being wise on what we show? How important is our design moves or decisions of what we display or allow people to encounter with?