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- Title
Making new history: Contemporary art and the temporal orientations of climate change in Oceania.
- Authors
Wander, Maggie
- Abstract
This article explores artistic production in the region of Oceania that resists the ahistorical and future-oriented temporality of climate change discourse, as it perpetuates colonial structures of power by denying Indigenous futures and ignoring the violent histories that have led to the current climate breakdown. In the video poem Anointed (2018), prominent climate justice activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner strategically combines spoken word poetry with visual montage in order to situate Cold War nuclear tests by the US military within the same temporal plane as rising sea levels currently threatening the Marshall Islands. Katerina Teaiwa's exhibition Project Banaba (2017) similarly mobilizes archival imagery in order to visualize the genealogical relationship between Banabans and the settler landscapes of Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. Sean Connelly's architectural and design practice in Hawaiʻi Futures, an ongoing digital design project that engages with the threats of sea level rise and coastal erosion in Hawaiʻi, problematizes linear formations of time and favours a future structured around cyclical, ecological time instead. Interacting with vastly different sites, strategies and temporalities, these three multidisciplinary projects provide critical alternatives to the ahistorical framing of colonial climate change in Oceania and thus play a crucial role in constructing a more just future.
- Subjects
OCEANIA; MARSHALL Islands; CLIMATE change; HISTORY in art; ARCHITECTURAL practice; COLONIES; COASTAL changes; ANTIFOULING paint; COASTAL zone management; AMERICAN poetry
- Publication
Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies, 2021, Vol 9, Issue 2, p155
- ISSN
2050-4039
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1386/nzps_00072_1