LAGIMOANA

Lemi Ponifasio
Born in Lano, Samoa, in 1964.
He lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand.

Choreographer and theater director Lemi Ponifasio is internationally renowned in his field. Drawing from the mythologies of native cultures of the Pacific Islands, he creates powerful images for his ceremonial stagings that challenge and transcend conventional ideas of theater, dance, and civic action. In 1995, he established MAU, a global collaborative, as a platform for critical reflection and creativity with artists, scholars, activists, intellectuals, and community leaders. The Samoan word mau means “a declaration to the truth of a matter” or “revolution,” as in an effort to transform the status quo. It also derives its name from the eponymous nonviolent Samoan independence movement of the early 1900s.
At the 56th Biennale di Venezia, Ponifasio presents Lagi Moana. Lagi, the Samoan word for heaven, also describes the songs and chants that call and cry to the ancestors. Moana is the undifferentiated watery world that is the ocean. The people of the Pacific Islands address their songs and chants either to Lagi or to Moana, the traditional abodes of the ancestors and the dead. Ponifasio’s multifaceted project is a welcome call to the ocean, Moana, to come and take us back to the matter that makes up our ancient genetic origins. It signals that man’s destination, tagata, is to embrace the coming of Moana as a way to evolve beyond the so-called Anthropocene epoch, a term that many scientists use to refer to the period that begins when human activities have had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems. The project is best described as a song that is sung at the end of the world, a call that brings about a new beginning.
Lagi Moana will unfold in several stages, beginning with Falelalaga or House of Women, a symbolic compound created by Chilean architect Cazu Zegers. In this halfopen rectangular module, bathed in natural light and built near the water by the Giardino delle Vergini, a group of six women make tapa, a type of woven, decorated barkcloth. Sometimes they work as a tapa; at other times, quietly alone. For Ponifasio, the tapa made during the Biennale in its different forms, whether stenciled or hanging, constitute the “tapa bodies.” Tapa-making is at once the act of weaving new genealogies and of accompanying the dead. Visitors are invited to take part in the tapa work.
In the communal nature of its activities and in the worlds that hover between living and dead, darkness and light, Falelalaga is not merely a house; it is an activated zone where meaning is never complete. It is “the house of night and day,” a place offering a continuous program of performances, discussions, and the active participation of members of Ponifasio’s MAU Company.