This is an interview between the artist Jewel Block and art historian Stacy L. Kamehiro, based on their conversations between May 2018 and November 2021. Block and Kamehiro discuss some of the conceptual frameworks and creative strategies developed by the artist to chronicle the experiences of her family relocating to Southern California from American Sāmoa, and address issues of memory, place-making, and Sāmoan-American identity processes.

This special issue of Pacific Arts centers on the theme “Pacific Island Worlds: Transpacific Dis/Positions,” which was the topic of a two-day series of events held at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) in May 2018. This generative meeting explored Oceanic rootedness and mobility, grounded and expansive kinships, worlding, place-making, and colonial histories and their legacies. In important ways, it grew out of the “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge” symposium, also hosted by UCSC, nearly two decades earlier. “Pacific Island Worlds” was dedicated to the memory of Teresia Teaiwa, a graduate of UCSC’s History of Consciousness doctoral program (2001) who had passed away in 2017 and whose academic, activist, and creative work profoundly inspired Pacific studies scholars and artists around the world. Our introduction is a story of two conferences—moments, pauses, in an ongoing flow of historical, political, and intellectual activity.

This dissertation investigates how contemporary art in Oceania materializes the role of colonial history in understanding and addressing climate change. Future-centric representations and solutions to rising sea levels and dwindling biodiversity—such as apocalypse narratives and techno-fixes—allow for escapism from the root causes of ecological collapse. Colonially induced climate change in Oceania stems from the control and dispossession of Indigenous Pacific bodies and lands, urban and agricultural development, militarism, and resource extraction. This dissertation asks how contemporary art in Oceania and its diaspora helps global audiences understand the role of colonial history in these issues. Without a deeper engagement with colonialism, we risk repeating and perpetuating unequal structures of power into the future. How, then, does artistic practice make manifest the dialogic relationship between space and time in the context of climate change? By materializing the continually unfolding past on which the present and future depend, contemporary art has transformative potential for our responses to the climate crisis. The chapters investigate a range of artistic strategies, including: the use of archival photography and film to challenge historical narratives about nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands and phosphate mining in Banaba; digital media and site-specific installations that materialize alternative pasts and futures in an urbanized Hawaiʻi; and experimental films that make visible the ancestral present in the Northern Territory of Australia, resisting apocalypse narratives and ecological grief that climate change often engenders. These case studies investigate how the legacies of colonialism are contributing to climate change in site-specific, localized ways, while also identifying regional and global connections. The project contributes to the fields of climate justice, Pacific Studies, and art history by taking a sustained look at the material entanglement between ecological collapse, temporality (the passage of time), and historical consciousness (how we understand our relationships to the past). The dissertation concludes by outlining a framework for Indigenous Pacific Climate Change Studies that foregrounds the arts as a necessary mechanism by which climate justice in Oceania can be achieved.

This essay examines the recent group exhibition SALTWATER / Interconnectivity co-curated by Katharine Losi Atafu-Mayo and Giles Peterson at the Tautai Gallery in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand (October 16, 2020 to January 30, 2021), including its public exhibition talks, forums, and performance activations. The exhibition was intended to embody the Moana worldview and explore questions of justice, equity, identity, and ecology through newly commissioned work by six multimedia Indigenous artists and designers from the Moana-Solwara (Oceania region): Katharine Losi Atafu-Mayo, Peter Elavera, Te Ara Minhinnick, Shawnee Tekki, Telly Tuita, and Gutiŋjarra Yunipiŋju.