Transcriber: Thanasis Zantrimas Reviewer: Chryssa Rapessi
I was born in the south of France,
where I grew up with my brother, sister and my parents.
And when I was 12 years old,
I received what I believed to be the greatest present
a child can be given.
The five of us took off on a nine-month journey
around the Mediterranean Sea in a camper van.
We travelled through Spain, Portugal, Morocco,
Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Jordan,
Syria, Turkey, Greece and Italy.
It changed my life.
Because for the first time, I realise as a child
that our way of growing up in France wasn’t the only way.
I realised that kids on the other side were growing up
in a completely different environment from mine,
that the way they relate to each other was different.
That they had different habits and traditions.
And yet when we played together,
our language was the same.
We all had the same desire to build huts,
to turn any hand trollies we found into vehicles.
We all loved running, swimming and laughing.
And I have been cherishing these candid memories ever since.
Yet, to be honest,
as an adult today,
creating these relationships has been quite more complicated.
I believe I decided to study art and design back home
because I could subconsciously feel its potential.
Its potential to create these same cross-cultural relationships,
connections and bridges.
I see art as a language,
a medium that has the power to reach and touch people in quite a unique way.
Not one that is forced, written black and white,
leaving you no space for imagination or critical thinking,
but one that gives you space for you to think and to feel.
Not one that gives you answers, but one that asks questions.
Art gives us the tools, the language to talk about trauma and pain.
It helps us approach what we don’t know
and who we don’t know,
with empathy and love, instead of fear and rejection.
This is why and what led me to put together the project
that I have been working on for the past three years
here in Aoteaora in New Zealand.
A project called Wāhine, which means woman in Te Reo Māori.
the Māori language.
Wāhine is a multimedia arts exhibition
that amplify Māori women’s voices and stories around Aoteaora,
offering a community the space to come and listen to these stories
while fostering mutual understanding, kinship and connection.
Wāhine combines a photography portrait of each woman
paired with a 12 to 15-minute audio portrait,
inviting people into their lives.
And each portrait is raw and honest,
touching on her joys, her troubles and tribulations.
Each portrait comes to life over many months
in a co-creation process between each woman and I,
which asks for a lot of vulnerability and courage from both of us.
The first step is a pretty deep interview and connection
and conversation that her and I share
around who she is and what being a Māori woman means to her.
This process also involves a part
where she gets to record on a small recorder
for a few weeks, the sounds of her daily life,
of her whānau, her family,
her surroundings, and what is important to her.
And then I collect the sounds that she is recorded
and with her voice I compile her audio portrait.
Her photo and audio portraits are then exhibited together
in the exhibition, offering space for the community to come,
to pause for a few minutes and to listen to them.
I started working on this kaupapa
about four months after arriving in New Zealand from France.
Everything was fresh and new
and the divide and the wound between Māori and Pākehā,
quickly became tangible to my eyes.
And by Pākehā,
I mean New Zealanders is of European descent.
I thought quite candidly that perhaps there was something that could be done
on my level with my sensitivity and awareness,
with my medium:
art.
I decided to learn about Te reo Māori, the Māori world,
about our Aoteaora’s history, reading books,
having conversation in corridor around these topics.
and I also met the local iwi, the local tribe.
I also decided to enroll in an ethnology degree
with the University of Strasbourg in France.
As I felt I was missing some tools in my kete, in my toolbox,
And not long after that,
I made the first woman who would take part in the exhibition.
Cindy Te Ata.
I remember so vividly the day her and I sat down.
Four hours of memories, of emotions and vulnerability.
I came home that day feeling more grounded and aligned than ever before,
with a deep, deep feeling that this is what I wanted
to put my energy and my skills into.
I wanted to create a safe space for Māori women to share their stories.
And most of all, I wanted all of us to be able to come and listen to them.
As I started moving forward of the project with the kaupapa,
I started to become aware of barriers
that had been taken down without being aware of them.
The barriers that everyone else was seeing and were afraid of.
The courageous and curious person that I was when I arrived,
was slowly losing its colours.
My mind was becoming a messy canvas,
with lots of questions and scribbles and fears.
I was suddenly so afraid of making mistakes and being culturally incorrect.
I started feeling guilt in my body
like a black hole in the middle of my chest.
I felt the ripples of colonisation.
I felt the weight of the guilt from the lands
that my French ancestors colonised.
Who was I to be holding this space?
Who was I to believe I could do this?
Who was I to believe that I was the right person?
Something new was knocking on my door.
What Alex Hotere-Barns calls Pākehā paralysis,
which he describes as emotional and intellectual difficulties
that Pākehā can experience when engaging
in social, cultural, economic and political relations with Māori.
And this paralysis emerges with the fear of getting it wrong,
of perpetuating cultural tokenism
and therefore not taking any actions at all.
Giving in to this fear,
hiding behind this guilt would have meant giving up the project.
It would have meant letting the ripples of colonisation
pull us apart once again.
So I had to move forward.
But now I could name it.
I could name that fear, which means I could start to work with it
and learnt its shape, its colour
and how it felt inside my chest.
And don’t get me wrong,
this fear still knocks on my door on a regular basis.
But when it does, I ground my feet into the earth,
I visualise it, I accept it,
I transform it.
I take action.
I remember the first interview I had with Cindy Te Ata.
I remember her vulnerability and her courage,
and I remember the dozens of people that I have witnessed
in the exhibition with tears rolling down their cheeks,
yearning for connection, for closeness and love.
I believe we need to talk about this paralysis, and it’s scary.
I was so afraid to show up today, not because I had to give a talk,
but because I knew I had to address it.
I had to be bigger than this fear to use the wrong words
and being culturally incorrect.
But once we can start this conversation,
once we can learn to become comfortable with this discomfort,
then and only then can we start to work with it.
And one way we can do this is by being students again.
I’ve made mistakes.
I’ve been clumsy, and that’s okay.
By saying out loud, I will probably make mistakes,
but believe that I really want to learn.
If that’s okay with you, I would love for you to tell me about them.
Tell me what I haven't done so well,
where I should stand and when it is my time to speak or to listen.
And sometimes I need to swallow my ego and allow myself to be vulnerable.
But here might be the key.
I’m not going to steal Brené Brown’s brilliant TED Talk and research,
but damn, she’s got it.
Vulnerability brings us together.
It allows us to feel close, to connect and to drop in.
And I believe that it can help open the dialogue
and have this difficult conversation
improving in a tangible way the well-being of our communities.
My hope is that this project will not only inspire empathy
for the stories that we hear,
but to reflect that same empathy onto ourselves.
Because I do believe that it is through empathy and respect
that we can start to acknowledge each other.
Wāhine reminds us that while we are all unique in our own ways,
so many of our experiences are alike.
Wāhine is now touring New Zealand.
It is touring around the country, starting with Te Wai Pounamu,
the South Island of New Zealand.
And each time it travels to new city,
I welcome a local woman to join the project
from the local iwi, the local tribe.
So far it has been exhibited in Whakatū Nelson,
in Mohua Golden Bay,
in Richmond,
in Ōtautahi Christchurch,
in Ōtepoti Dunedin and in Waihōpai Invercargill.
And it will soon head to Hokitika
where it will finish the South Island tour.
By then, it will feature nine women,
nine unique stories from this whenua, from this land,
from women who allowed themselves to be vulnerable to me and to the world.
And in June 2022,
Wāhine will head to the North Island, Te Ika-a-Māui,
continuously expanding and welcoming new women.
And I am beyond words.
How did I do it?
I just went for it.
One of the predominant feedback that I’ve been getting from the start
is this one.
“I can’t believe that you did this. I could never do it.”
“It’s too complicated. It’s probably because you’re French.
It made it easier for you.”
I believe anyone could do something similar.
Being French doesn’t inherently made me a different person.
What it did was make the first step easier.
I just knocked on the door without overthinking it.
I knew I didn’t know everything, and I embraced it.
I asked questions.
Keeping silent is comfortable.
Keeping things the way they’ve been is comfortable.
We need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable,
and we need to allow ourselves to be vulnerable
and to change and to be changed.
Because change does need to happen.
That’s the truth.
But it doesn’t always have to be a set outcome or a big action.
You don’t have to tour an exhibition around the country.
It can be subtle.
Sometimes we’re not even aware of the ramification
that one act of kindness, or openness can have.
So there is something that we can do as individuals, or as a community.
It is our responsibility to act on it
because we all have a role to play.
So I would like to set this intention with you today.
Let’s learn to make space to hold this vulnerability
for ourselves and for others.
Let’s be courageous and curious.
Let’s build huts together and find a common language.
We need to journey together and the rest will follow.
Kia ora.
(Applause)