Pacific Arts: The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association

This article describes Sāmoan-Australian artist Angela Tiatia’s performance video Lick (2015) as an act of Pacific Islander survivance. Recorded in and with the coastal waters of Tuvalu, the work emphasizes a direct and responsive encounter with the Pacific Ocean. The video’s intentional emphasis on Tiatia’s malu, a tattoo specific to Sāmoan women, and her choregraphed leg and hand gestures of balance represent a powerful visual proclamation of Tiatia’s Oceanic feminist relationship with the ocean. Her performance is an important challenge to the exotifying impulses of environmental documentaries and mainstream media that often represent Pacific Islanders as passive victims of sea level rise. In the context of current decolonizing performance literature and practices in Oceania, Lick is read as a strategic hydrochoreography—an embodied art practice that expresses the lively interconnection of body-ocean rhythms needed to sustain Indigenous futures.