Carriers of bodies and histories, knowledge and culture.

Deborah Lawler-Dormer

New Zealand Aotearoa is an Oceanic/Pacific country settled by Eastern Polynesians 700 - 1000 years ago. Innovative voyagers, Maori migrated in waka (canoes). Contemporary Maori iwi (tribes) trace their genealogy back to the waka from which iwi were named. They pass knowledge and genealogy through traditions of oratory (whaikorero) and art practices including waiata (song), whare whakairo (carved meeting house), tukutuku (woven wall panels in the meeting house), and the building of waka. What is also passed on is the innovative spirit of their ancestors.

Rachael Rakena is a Maori artist of Ngai Tahu tribal descent. She uses digital technologies in installations that voyage far from the materiality of traditional Maori arts while resonating with Maori values of innovation in this new century.

Like the voyaging, navigating and genealogy sustaining practices of her forbears, Rakena’s digital technologies establish concepts of ‘continuum, immersion, movement, space’ as being particularly relevant to cultural processes of ‘connecting and belonging’. The artist has devised the term Toi Rerehiko for digital art. She says, “The word rerehiko plays on rorohiko, the Maori word for computer, which translated literally means 'electric brain'. The word rerehiko has recently been used to mean 'electronic'. Toi rere hiko could be used to describe moving image arts or at least art that employs movement with electricity and flashes of light. That which flies, settling momentarily, but leaving no object."