No Location

The starting points for Salote Tawale’s work are her body and personal experiences. The artist carefully selects spaces, materials and construction techniques that speak to her identity as a queer woman of colour living away from the place of her birth.

Tawale’s work for APT10 is a large-scale raft that engages with her experiences as a member of the Fijian diaspora living in Australia. 'No Location' 2021 is inspired by a 15-metre long 'bilibili' (watercraft), named 'HMS No Come Back', that she first viewed in the Fiji Museum in Suva on a trip ‘home’ as a child. Tawale recounts imagining the vessel as the perfect home for someone shuttled between two countries. Thirty years later, in the context of rapid climate change and restricted movements associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, Tawale re creates 'HMS No Come Back' as a vessel designed to move between realities.

Inspired by the ingenuity and resourcefulness of her Fijian ancestors, Tawale’s craft is constructed from flexible bamboo, lashed together so it can be easily dismantled and re-created. Like the 'HMS No Come Back', Tawale’s craft is built to travel through water, avoiding natural obstacles and events, and is fitted out with features and equipment necessary for a long journey, including cooking, sleeping and recreational items. Like Tawale herself, these objects have both Fijian and Western heritage: we see recycled tarps, solar panels, plastic buckets, an air mattress and the artist’s old iPad, alongside bamboo cooking implements and a DIY oil-can camp stove.

'Bilibili' are traditionally constructed by a group of skilled men, and members of Brisbane’s Fijian community have been engaged in the build of No Location. Their presence and stories continue to warm this vessel in its new home.