Writer’s Residency : Writings

Dilohana Lekamge
29 May – 24 July 2023

A Glance at Intercultural Collectivism in Aotearoa

Aotearoa has a long history of racial segregation, and cultural clustering is one of the stark reminders of this issue. Residential segregation in Tāmaki Makaurau continually increases with the rising house prices and has many consequences; one of which being people from specific geographical regions in the world tend to live in areas largely occupied by those same cultural groups. Cultural differences to some seem like a barrier to find common ground, and often gets in the way of creating sympathy for one another’s experiences. To others, however, difference offers an opportunity to find commonalities in experiences, building relationships that can be utilised to serve common interests.

Throughout this residency I spoke to collectives that have members from varied cultural backgrounds. I aimed to investigate how these groups come together to produce their work and serve the kaupapa that they have collectively agreed is worthy of service, given their divergent backgrounds.The collectives that I spoke to for this research all function in different ways—they have various motives and aims for their work.

Collectives often begin as in-good-faith ventures, a group of colleagues or friends with a shared pursuit or interest that forms a bond, in order to generate an output that stems from this focal point. For instance, Āhua’s mission in “decolonising our creative futures” has been paramount since their formation. Sonya Milford, the Founder and Design Director of Āhua, explains the collective and challenges what creativity looks like, who it is for, and who gets to participate in it. She explains that art in Aotearoa’s creative industry has been created with Eurocentric ideals in mind and other communities have not had the opportunity to create the art scene.

Āhua come together to combat these foundations and create a more diverse pathway for our creative industries going forward. Milford wanted to highlight the excellence in the QTBIPOC community that she was aware of, desiring the creation of a network that would allow for that excellence to be seen more widely. The collective has its core members and as projects come up they reach out to artists to get involved, using the structure of the collective to provide opportunities for QTBIPOC and takatāpui artists. Creating as many opportunities as possible for the creatives in their communities builds space for individuals to explore their tuakiritanga, an encapsulation of all that makes up their person.

Āhua approaches their mission in a multifaceted manner: curating exhibitions, forming an online magazine, and promoting events, essays and podcasts that support the collective’s kaupapa. One of their more recent exhibitions was Reframing Karakia (2022) at Studio One Toi Tū. Reframing Karakia aimed to approach karakia without the connection to religion that was imposed upon the form through colonisation, and explore how it can be utilised for QTBIPOC community. The exhibition included artwork by Atarangi Anderson, Mariadelle Abbey Gamit, Marc Conaco, Taylor Te Atarua, Hazel Zishun, Tommie Love, Kauri Waihoea, Sara Moana, and Sonya Milford. Each artist contributed work from their own practice and navigated themes of one’s personal relationship to their own identity.

For the exhibition, Milford also commissioned the singer-songwriter Em Walker AKA Theia AKA Te Kaahu (Waikato-Tainui, Ngaati Tiipa) to compose a karakia for the collective and this exhibition. Walker’s karakia describes the members of the collective who originate from the four winds; it explores how taiwi have access to their ancestral homes and knowledge. As described by Sam Bailey (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Huarere), one of the collective’s members, the act of presenting this karakia in Te Reo Māori was a gesture of manaakitanga, showcasing the act of hosting tauiwi as manuhiri on these lands. In having this karakia written in Te Reo, Āhua acknowledged the cultural plurality of the collective and its kaupapa by first noting mana whenua and the land that we stand on as theirs. Those who are tauiwi are manuhiri, guests to this place, who in the process of approaching decolonisation, should firstly recognise the colonisation of the place that we all now reside. This is the lens through which our multiculturalism should be understood.

As Bailey acknowledges, the goal of collectivism is safety, and coming together should result in protection, which is a shared responsibility. The goal is the shared collective vision, as opposed to an individual understanding of personal desire and requirement. Bailey describes their process in working together as iterative and collective, describing the need for adjustments to be made if members feel isolated while participating in the group.

This sense of community extends to the music industry, where many artists of minority background have to face similar issues regarding a lack of appreciation for diverse voices and artists. The Eastern Sound Collective is one collective that came together in response to this desire to see more Asian musicians in Aotearoa’s music industry and to connect with more Asian artists. Nadia Freeman, the collective’s founding member, describes feeling a disconnect from her cultural community, as pursuing art is not an encouraged pathway in many Asian households and therefore people, like Freeman, become an outlier in pursuing a creative practice. The collective granted a way through which Freeman could find Asian Aotearoa musicians, like herself, and instead form a community around this shared interest. This quality is what many of the members find most valuable about the network.

The collective started in 2020, when Freeman started to build connections by reaching out to artists she had come across through media, through Facebook groups, and eventually word-of-mouth. Initially, the group only succeeded in recruiting South Asian members, but after deliberations, they wanted to expand their reach. The barriers that they faced as musicians of South Asian descent, were likely to be issues that other Asian musicians would also have to face. As a result, they made extra efforts to reach out to musicians of other Asian backgrounds. Incrementally the group meets to discuss the long and short term goals of the collective, how it functions and how to develop its overall structure. Since it is a relatively young collective, only beginning in 2020, they are regularly readjusting their key principles, aims, and processes, to ensure that the group is serving the interests of its members.

The collective have organised several gigs in the past which helped with the promotion of their artists and the group itself, however, their main focus is to offer support to their fellow members. The collective is often approached by those who are seeking culturally traditional music, which most of the musicians in the collective do not make. Those inquiries are not genuinely interested in the music that their artists are making, nor are they looking to have a more diverse lineup, but rather to include an exoticised Asian music that conveniently disregards the contemporary musical styles that many of these artists practice. This kind of pigeonholing is an example of the prejudice that the collective aims to extinguish, in that showing the variation of genre within the collective showcases that musicians of Asian descent aren’t only interested in playing music that is traditional to their ancestral homes.

Eastern Sound Collective’s goal to have wider and better acknowledgement of Asian Aotearoa musicians was furthered with their establishment of the podcast Eastern Sound Stories, which interviews numerous musicians, like jazz musician and double-bassist Umar Zakaria, hip-hop artist Scalper AKA Nadeem Shafi, and singer and song-writer Alisa Xayalith, from The Naked and Famous. The series is produced by the collective in conjunction with Radio Active.FM, with members of the group acting as producers and presenters. It was made with the support of funding from NZ On Air Music, and in 2023 won the NZ On Air Outstanding Music Journalism award at the Taite Music Prize.

After meetings they sometimes go to their favourite food spots and share together that way, or go to gigs together to support their fellow members and other Asian musicians playing in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. One collective member, Arindam Sen, describes the group as “A support network. A network of knowledge, contacts, and experiences which can help cross-fertilize…as a collective we can go out and seek information with a little bit more power, rather than as individuals.”

The Killing is another collective of artists, in this case visual artists, who came together to form a sense of community, but in a more closely bound manner. The least formal of the collectives that I spoke to, The Killing is a group of close friends who all recently graduated from Elam, who want to promote collectivism in an art world which they have often found to be an isolating realm. This friendship is the main pillar of this collective and what drives them to keep working together. They describe themselves as a “6-celled body” made up of the artists Daniella Bay, Minsoh Choi, p. A, Meleseini Faleafa, Tristan Bloemstein, and Venus Blacklaws. Describing themselves as a family, Choi states “We would rather save our friendship and our family if the collective goes sideways”.

Their artwork has been shown at Artspace Aotearoa, Papakura Art Gallery and RMIT Gallery in Melbourne, and on all of these occasions, they conceptualise the work as a group and make the artwork together—sometimes crowding their flats with fabric and stuffing for large scale plushies. There are elements of their individual styles in the work, but with the scale that they are working at, their installations become a bold, brightly coloured, and immersive experience, with moments to zoom in on these different features. As they describe it, it’s “preserving our kid-selves.”

Choi and Bay describe the disadvantages that come with working as an individual in the arts, especially when coming from a minority background. In funding applications, proposals, artist bio’s and descriptions of work, it is an expectation, and often a requirement, to outline one’s otherness and assign it to their artwork. As they explain, this can be a restrictive and reductive approach to an individual’s practice, which contains as many multitudes as the individual themselves. The power of working in a collective means that those categories are not as distinctly underlined. Their work does not have to be assigned to any particular identifiers, other than that of being work created by all of them together. As Faleafa describes, “collectivism is inherent in our cultures. It’s passed down from our ancestors. They all worked together—there was never an individualistic pursuit.”

In living in Aotearoa we must acknowledge that the land we live on influences our relationship with each other and our multiculturalism. If we are to attempt to work together with different cultural backgrounds and world views, there is one main unifying factor, which is this place upon which we work together. Sam Bailey, from Āhua, encourages tauiwi to “participate in the indigenous culture in the motu that you’re in [as this] will help you connect to your own culture because you have to be a participant of sharing to then consider how you might share”. Groups like Asians Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga have come together with their status as manuhiri at the very forefront of their work, stating that they “are a group of tauiwi from various Asian backgrounds who support tino rangatiratanga and mana motuhake for the Indigenous people of Aotearoa.” They lead workshops so that members of Asian communities can understand Te Tiriti and their responsibility in taking part in adhering to its principles. Group members are present at Māori-led movements, protests, initiatives and campaigns, standing in solidarity with mana whenua.

The collective has three chapters across Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Tāmaki Makaurau, and Ōtepoti, and separately also work on building relationships with other Asian activists and providing support to them. In their work they have allowed forTe Tiriti to be more accessible to those within our population who don’t have English or Te Reo Māori as their first languages, which ultimately offers an avenue through which manuhiri communities can better understand the cultural context of their new home and better communicate with its history, cultural complexities and its first people. Asians Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga fights cultural separatism and offers a sharing of knowledge for the betterment and wider understanding of how this country should function in order to serve tangata whenua and consequently, the greater multicultural population of Aotearoa.

Collectivism provides support and reassurance. It gives us the opportunity to hear other perspectives that as an individual, we might not have otherwise considered or imagined. This can help catch potential errors, expand the breadth of a project and improve our ability to empathise. Though these are all idealised notions, it does not diminish our responsibility to keep these goals in mind, especially when working in an intercultural context and towards greater social cohesion. It turns away from individuality and considers a shared kaupapa that serves one larger purpose which feeds a longing that each individual has, whether it be for community, representation, activism, or a combination of all three. For all of these collectives, there is a process of continuous reflection and restructure which gives each group the opportunity to evolve their formations and adapt to the needs of its members and the contexts that they work within.

To work collectively requires humility, active communication and open-mindedness that allows for the greater objectives to be met and a sense of trust and hospitality within a community to flourish. Many of the collectives I spoke to spoke about the protection, care, and power in numbers that their group offers them. Belonging to something offers a sense of companionship and connection that working solely as an individual cannot offer. Within the social context that is Aoteroa, with its long histories of colonisation, racial intolerance, bigotry and separatism, it is no surprise to those who have felt the weight of these injustices that they seek togetherness with others who can empathise with them. In working together to push against these formed barriers one can find more fruitful and comforting ways to traverse these social structures. As Meleseini Faleafa from The Killing stated “Collective work needs to be more common because it’s so underrated. There is so much juice in it.”