In Tūrangawaewae I haerenga to Tauranga Moana, finding stories of my ancestors in the archives and imagining their home before the Land Wars and confiscations. I peel back layers of colonial capitalism stacked on the whenua, finding a place for my feet to stand.
Still from Tūrangawaewae. October 2019 – July 2020. HD video, 21m 42s.
Tūrangawaewae is chapter five of Moana Calling Me Home, a series of moving-image works from a Master of Visual Arts. This transformational research project is a haerenga — a journey — of reconnection with whakapapa, with ancestral relationships, and with Te Moananui a Kiwa: the ocean and her islands from which these relationships emerged.