Rosanna Raymond is a Moana Pasifika artist and is a longstanding researcher of the practice of vā (meaning relationships and the space between us), which investigates the spaces between museums and indigenous communities. She uses her body and art to challenge and negotiate these relationships, offering a fresh and unique perspective on museums’ and communities’ discourses. One of the driving forces of her work is the significance and interconnectedness of the body and the spirit which makes up her identity and personhood. Her understanding and phrasing of her identity empowers others to recall the strength and expansiveness of their cultural and indigenous identity.
In her performance art, Raymond positions her body and spirit environmentally, geographically, and genealogically. She is highly conscious of her vā, fostering connections with objects, the environment, people, and institutions. Wearing classical garments and carrying culturally significant objects from museum collections in her performances, she brings to life this heritage with her body and movement. The performances effectively repower objects, and restore mana, highlighting the significance of the body in activating the vā. While museums restrict their acquisitions to storage drawers and exhibition displays, she exhibits them otherwise, no small feat in the museum context.
Raymond’s creative performance is a poignant and hope-inspiring reminder of what once was and what can be, simultaneously. While the legacies of christianization and colonization remain, she brings the original and indigenous narrative to the fore in conceptually strong and visually powerful gestures. Her designs are created with everything connected to her personhood in mind; environmental, geographical and genealogical. While some works are more complex to access than others, they give an incentive to search for further explanations of each thought process and to thus broaden understanding of the practice. In her work Glass Walls and Dark Seas performed online in the framework of the Divergent Conservation Conference at INHA, Paris, in December 2022 Raymond creates a space and time aligned with traditional customs to share her artistic practice through thought-provoking presentations and talanoa – a Pacific conception of interactive dialogue allowing for decision making and consensus. She fearlessly poses challenging questions, asking museum staff to confront or, at least, consider issues they often struggle to address directly. She strives for a non-western epistemic approach that challenges museums to acknowledge indigenous perspectives.esemantise”, in “ecologies” that are “necessarily plural”, as Bénédicte Savoy’s and Felwine Sarr’s suggest (Sarr and Savoy 2018: 27)?