With this body I remember, with this body I rewild | Latai Taumoepeau
With this body I remember, with this body I re-wild is a new work developed by Latai Taumoepeau, winner of the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art 2022, commissioned by ANTI Festival for its 2023 edition.
With this body I remember, with this body I rewild is a slow, live ritual.
Artists Latai and Hanna dissolve notions of individual space, physical borders and time, leading an exploration of inhabiting their ancestral stories with collaborators Elin Kåven and Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey.
Guided by the Peräniemi peninsula to remember beings from the depths of the Mōana/Pacific Ocean and Sápmi/ Arctic Forest across digital live stream technology to connect us in Finland to Hanna in Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country Australia.
Moving through a small forest surrounded by a lake on the edge of the city of Kuopio, we awaken our sensitivities to embody a place these artists have never walked before. Collectively, we practise a performance of the body that is oceanic, arctic, disabled and diaspora, belonging to complex ecosystems that require our active attention and participation.
Background
As an artist from the Pacific Island Kingdom of Tonga residing in Gadigal land Sydney Australia, Latai Taumoepeau brings to Finland an Oceanic perspective from the Moana (Great Ocean).
At the centre of Latai’s work is the Tongan doctrine of Fonua, that land and body are inseparable. She’ll collaborate with artist and fellow climate emergency and crip advocate Hanna Cormick, but who is Finnish with Sami heritage, based in Australia and but physically separated from her country by her acquired disability. Hanna’s practice is “a reclamation of body through radical visibility”.
With this body takes audiences into a forest surrounded by a lake, on the edge of the city of Kuopio, inviting them into shared rituals as participants and performers. Hanna will be connected to country and present in the performance via digital streaming from her Canberra home via digital streaming, joining Latai, Sami Yoik vocalist Elin Kåven (Norway), and extraordinary magicians, listening to landscapes as much as they sonically animate them, composers Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey (Australia).
With this body layers the Kuopio forest and lake with multiple maps of Tonga, Australia and Norway, Pacific islands a reverse image of Finnish lakes, evoking physical and cultural landscapes and ecologies: the totemic reindeer and lichen from the arctic north, seaweed and shark from the oceanian south.
This new work prioritises positionality and relationality by facilitating deeper connection to place as first peoples to our respective ancestral lands located as diaspora in the oldest continuing culture on the planet. It brings together two primary artists with complex body-centred practices informed by their distinct cultural heritage, disability and neurodivergence, unique perspectives on the impact of the increasing temperatures of the oceans on all lifeforms in their respective regions. They are also diaspora exploring innovation in cultural structures.
Latai says: Our complicit practices in performance climate advocacy and the position of our bodies is central to understanding that our connection is always facilitated through complex webs of interdependence.We are exploring our embodied practices as technicians in performance with conscious understanding of our political bodies with a variety of intersections that connect us as settlers, choreographers, disabled and neuro divergent, frontline climate change activists who have oceanic and arctic ecosystems that experience place and body as belonging. They are inseparable.”