 |
 |
|
|
|
THE RESURRECTION OF TIGILAU
Colombian American sound artist Marco Antonio Larsen re-forms through spatial sound manipulation and placement, new work by Samoan American playwright/filmmaker Dan Taulapapa McMullin, in the premiere of their sound installation based on the Sina and Tigilau (pronounced “tee-ngee-LAoo”) tales.
This multi-speaker sound environment interweaves location recordings documented by McMullin in Samoa and America Samoa of traditional versions of “Sina and Tigilau”, a series of Polynesian pagan stories of the resurrection of dead lovers from the afterlife, with contemporary urban myths of a drag queen turned into a bat and a one-eyed fish who leads souls to the afterlife.
At a time when many questions about indigenous sovereignty are being asked – who represents it, what is ones position in relation to it, how does mass media manipulate it – the artists offer their own insights on indigenous cultural representation and its contemporary incarnation. The narratives the artists create are relatively modest in comparison to the multiplicity of narratives that have come out of the islands from which they originate.
McMullin and Larsen’s narrative installation is constructed along particular storytelling styles of the locations and identities under investigation, yet they fracture the typical singular perspective, through the use of multiple sound sources, continuous loops, and the editing possibilities of electronic media. When one sound narrative supplants another again and again, or continuously moves in and out of aural focus, the realities of translocation begin to set in. It is within these disquieting moments that new and multiple views begin to emerge, and issues of politics and identity found outside the usual frames of representation slip in.
| |
|
|
