LIVE FUTURES: Keynote Lecture, Rosanna Raymond (LIVE ON-THE-LINE)

“As an artist, my body has become a powerful space for my art practice and cultural heritage to come together. My body has become a site of resistance, allowing me to traverse the genealogical and geographical space, collapsing time, helping to re-render and privilege my Moana body.” - Rosanna Raymond 

For Liveworks’ 2021 Keynote Lecture, Auckland-based artist Rosanna Raymond draws from the warps and wefts of more than 30 years of experience in the creative arts. Fearlessly fusing artistic disciplines and finding new methods for the strengthening and evolution of Pacific cultures, Raymond’s work draws strongly from her Samoan heritage and imagines new possibilities for artistic practice.

Raymond’s Keynote Lecture unpacks the unique and hybrid ways in which she centralizes the Samoan Indigenous index of the Vā as an embodied practice. Vā is a Samoan term for space—although this space is not linear, or indeed empty. The Vā is an active space: it binds people and things together. It forms relationships and necessitates reciprocal obligations. And as Raymond explains, “I feel the Vā needs a body, a performative body that acti.VĀ.tes the mauli (spark of life) as a vessel for the past, present and future”.

Would the Real Tusk Please Stand Up? is a visceral offering incorporating aural, visual and performative elements weaving in and out of spoken words—words both academic and artistic, land and ocean, SaVAge and Sisterly—to share the insights afforded to Raymond by her lifelong engagement with the Vā.