Latai Taumoepeau：Ocean Island Mine

Photo by Sanja Samic

Latai Taumoepeau

Ocean Island Mine

A woman, 500 kg of ice, and her action to relocate the pile from point A to point B, shovel by shovel. Back and forth, she works the open-cut mines of the past into the future of climate change, excavating the solid white rock into invisibility. This time, in the humid summer heat in urban Taipei, inviting the audience to remap Taiwan’s place in the Pacific ecosystem.

The melting ice evokes images of climate crisis, but climate change is not the first instance of environmental devastation in Oceania. The islands of Nauru and Banaba had been over-excavated for phosphate to make fertilizer that boosted mass agricultural production in Australia, New Zealand and Britain, leaving Banaba uninhabitable and its people relocated to Fiji where their descendants still live today. Facing the past, the Tonga-diaspora artist backs into the menacing future: companies have been tendering Tonga, Nauru and Kiribati for experimental ocean floor mining licenses for minerals like gold and nickel.

Observing a cyclical view of time and the indigenous practice of maintaining space through social relationships, Latai Taumoepeau reframes the climate emergency and questions the asymmetrical geopolitical relations through compelling images that delve into the legacies of resource plunder. 

 
Photo by Rhett Wyman
 

Latai Taumoepeau, Tonga / Australia

Latai Taumoepeau makes live-art-work. Her faivā (body-centred practice) is from her homelands, the Island Kingdom of Tonga and her birthplace Eora Nation. She mimicked, trained and un-learned dance, in multiple institutions of learning, beginning with her village, a suburban church hall, the club and a university.

Her faivā (performing art) centres Tongan philosophies of relational vā (space) and tā (time); cross-pollinating ancient and everyday temporal practice to make visible the impact of climate crisis in the Pacific. She conducts urgent environmental movements and actions to assist transformation in Oceania.

Latai engages in the socio-political landscape of Australia with sensibilities in race, class & the female body politic; committed to bringing the voice of unseen communities to the frangipani-less foreground. Latai has presented and exhibited across borders, countries, and coastlines. Her works are held in private and public collections including written publications.
Latai won the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art in Finland and was recently awarded a 2021 Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, and the Australia Council of the Arts Fellowship in the Emerging and Experimental Arts category. She is also a recipient of the Prague Quadrennial - Excellence in Performance Design Award in 2019.

In the near future Latai will return to her ancestral home and continue the ultimate faivā of deep sea voyaging and celestial navigation before she becomes ancestor.

The more ancient I am, the more contemporary my work is.
I am not doing anything new.
When I do faivā, I perform space. When I do space, I do time - they are inseparable.
When I faivā, I do form. When I do form, I also do content - they are inseparable.
Faiva is the art of organising and performing social duties related to place, the body and environment - they are inseparable.

I am an anti-disciplinary artist. Alive today.

Photo by Sanja Samic