Cafe Scientifique: Ancient Futures - Late 18th and Early 19th Century Tongan Arts and Their Legacies

In Ancient Futures, a project funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi under a Marsden Grant, academics and artists work together to interpret (Ancient) late 18th and early 19th century Tongan arts and their legacies (Futures).

For the last five years the Ancient Futures’ team has examined art objects of exchange and encounters between Tongan islanders and European visitors in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, now held in museum collections worldwide. We’ve been looking for continuity within contemporary practices, innovation in the arts of Tongan ancestors and their descendants, and seeking to reclaim and repatriate to Tonga and its diaspora the knowledge systems encoded in woven, layered, wrapped and carved objects.

The Ancient Futures team has visited more than 30 collections in the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Sweden, Japan, Australia and Aotearoa. Central to the aims and praxis of the project has been the bringing together of our different knowledge bases and providing opportunities for the interpretation of ancient items in contemporary works as creative legacies for the future.

We learned from each other, often collapsing disciplinary boundaries and always adhering to the values the project was founded on, including faka‘apa‘apa or respect for each other’s observations and speculations. The synergy of working in the museum stores as a team proved, as we had hoped, both exciting and enlightening. The sum total of shared ‘table talk’ much more than our individual knowledge and expertise. The opinions and insights of artists and academics alike adding to the often sparse written details associated with each object by each institution, and their various intersections and divergences have been both unpredictable and highly generative.

Dr Phyllis Herda has worked across Anthropology, Pacific History and Women’s/Gender Studies. She began working in Tonga in the 1980s and researching and publishing on Tongan ethnography, European explorers in Polynesia, Polynesia art and material culture, Tongan oral tradition and history, gender, disease, and colonialism as well as Polynesian textiles – traditional and contemporary. Phyllis has taught at Victoria University and recently retired from the University of Auckland. Her degrees are from University of Arizona (BA, Anthropology), University of Auckland (MA, 1st class, Anthropology) and ANU (PhD, Pacific History).

Dagmar Vaikalafi Dyck of Tongan, Dutch, Polish and German ancestry is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, art educator and social justice advocate. She was the first Tongan woman to graduate in 1995 from Elam School of Fine Arts with a PG Diploma in Fine Arts. Dagmar has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her works are held in significant collections. She has an MProfSt (Hons) in Education from the University of Auckland. She is a member of Auckland Museum’s Pacific Advisory Group along with other governance roles.

This talk will begin at 6:30pm on zoom: https://aut.zoom.us/j/93339372001?pwd=UEVKaWtCREhWQnpYQXpyVGdiRDdqQT09

The room will be open from 6:15 for the audience to join.