Description:

In 2023, Ka emiemi was Aotearoa’s contribution to the Countries and Regions exhibition at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space (PQ). It was a collaborative co-creation of eight artists from a diverse range of practice backgrounds and disciplines, each reflecting a facet of the wide ranging performance design landscape of Aotearoa. The curatorial call to collaborate on a new work for the festival is a shift back to earlier instances of New Zealand at PQ, where artists were invited to draw from their creative practice in the creation of a new work, rather than the exhibition and presentation of existing works.
The title of this work, Ka emiemi, was gifted to the project by Te Matahīapo before the artists began creating together. It holds the curatorial intention for NZPQ23, and describes coming together to assemble, to create. This action of collective expression responds to the events of the last three years, the global pandemic has seen significant and continuous cancellation of work and loss of opportunities to gather together as artists and with audiences in Aotearoa and internationally. It also responds to the PQ call to imagine a future of performance design and scenography. Ka emiemi invites collective imagining.
Ka emiemi refers to both the collaboration of these artists and the installation work that they created together. The material processes expressed through this work are colliding and orchestrated. This is also true of the co-creation process that was itself composed of instances of structure and chance.
Ka emiemi the installation is a multi-media work consisting of a tall structure, with a series of resonating panels suspended around a steel skeleton. These panels served as speakers and vibrating surfaces that played a 12 hour long sequence. Sound was played through 8 spatialized exciters resonating metal sheets at a range of heights inviting different intimacies with the audience. The sonic score built through an intense layering of textural reverberance creating wider fields of sound with each passing hour. Above a stuttering brush swept across a perforated roof allowing for fine hand milled paper rocks to skim and slide down the aluminum panels. Material that evaded these apertures collected on the rolled eave of the roof accumulating into a mass reaching tipping points unknown to the audience and designer. These chance moments of material processes coming together, collecting, dispersing and collapsing captures the precarious serendipity of our ecological and anthropogenic systems.
Ka emiemi proposed a new, innovative approach to collaboration for artists to utilise the unique opportunity that the PQ offers, as the preeminent event celebrating the forefront of design for live performance and associated fields. Although the performing and live arts is a highly collaborative industry it is not often that artists are able to collaborate, co-create, gather to reflect, share process and skills with their peers. Ka emiemi provided an opportunity for artists/designers who work in similar areas to create something together, led by design and art practice. The project and its unique process is designed to create an environment where artists can meaningfully collaborate, informing the collective and individual artistic practices of the participants, and encouraging future collaboration.This installation work was created over 1 year.
The Prague Quadrennial (PQ) is the world’s largest performance design and scenography event. Established in 1967 and held every four years, it celebrates and brings together the best international design for performance, scenography, and theatre in a series of exhibitions, festivals and education programmes.