police band is hot contemporary art

hot contemporary art?

https://youtu.be/dZGjSRf4eDc



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Michel Tuffery's large-scale performative installation opens up the "memory banks" on Samoa's German colonial history.
Who'd have thought a police band was hot contemporary art?

Cross platform, collaborative, multi-disciplinary, regional, and embedded with storytelling and cross-cultural connection – this project certainly ticks all the boxes of what is hot now across numerous art sectors. And, yet, this project is far from “fashionable” – at its centre is a police band and a very un-sexy history of German colonisation.

Siamani Samoa: Michel Tuffery & The Royal Samoa Police Band is a visual art installation-cum-performance-cum-participatory event commissioned by Sydney’s Carriageworks and opening this week (16-18 July).


Michel Tuffery told ArtsHub: ‘We are using music as a way to open up people’s memory banks. The community is the artwork itself – the music is just the instrument.’

A New Zealand born artist of Samoan, Rarotongan and Tahitian heritage, Michel Tuffery has played a seminal role in the development and visibility of Contemporary Pacific Islander art.

Lisa Havilah, Director of Carriageworks, said: ‘Michel Tuffery is one of the most important artists working in our region. Carriageworks is delighted to present this major new commission which speaks across generations and cultures. We are honoured to be hosting the Royal Samoa Police Band for their first performance outside Samoa.’

Tuffery added: ‘Having that [police] uniform appear here in Australia will be surreal. There is a lot of pride in it and some locals here have relations in the police force in Samoa – so it is a vehicle to talk about that history here.’

Every morning, the Royal Samoa Police Band marches through the Samoan capital of Apia, from their Headquarters to Government House, while playing their version of Viennese brass band music and concluding with the Samoan national anthem.

Tuffery’s large-scale live performance work explores the German colonial administration of Samoa from 1900 to 1914 and its ongoing impact in contemporary Samoa.

Tuffery, who calls himself a ‘fruit salad’ with mixed heritage, told ArtsHub that genealogy is really important in Samoa. ‘Siamini is the local word for German, so German-Samoa. Using it got every one’s head up – “we thought we’d passed that long ago”. But German buns are still sold. Rather than the jam filling it is caramelised coconut – see, so we are still eating the past.

‘How I see it, is they pretty much wiped our hard drives – very few documentations are left from that German period. Looking at the architecture it is pretty much worn out and I didn’t take much notice of it until my mum mentioned we were German … and then my fascination with the Police band – it got me suspicious.’

A further trigger for Siamani Samoa was in 1998 when Tuffery saw a collection of selu pau (wooden Samoan hair combs) from the 1900s in the collection of the Canterbury Museum in New Zealand.

These intricately carved and shaped hair combs reminded him of the delicate wooden fretwork adorning the facades of many of the German-built buildings in Apia. For him they told a story that he described as literally ‘combing through history’.

‘When you speak in our language, you speak in metaphors. And they are sacred objects to use – the hair, the head is so sacred,’ explained Tuffery.

‘It’s about bring information back and sharing it … And the projections just enhance that memory bank,’ Tuffery told ArtsHub.

This fascination with the pictorial and material history of Samoa has resonated in Tuffery’s work for over two decades, and Siamani Samoa extends that by combining archival and contemporary images projected on a 6 x 12 meter screen together with tapas collected from the local Samoan communities to create an immersive engagement.

Tuffery said: ‘Every culture has its own unique way of achieving history that may be in restorative and preservation of natural environments, persons, architecture, literature or art and objects. Samoa traditionally has a strong oral history practice and for me, Siamani Samoa is like that moment when one brings out the family album – perhaps the album at the bottom of the shelf that no one gets to see – and reminds us that we are literally eating the past.’

Seventeen members of the Royal Samoa Police Band will travel to Australia for the first time to participate in Siamani Samoa at Carriageworks. They will be joined by local community groups, Liverpool-based Matavai Cultural Arts and the EFKS Canterbury Church who, embedded within the audience, will sing popular old Samoan songs.

‘We’ll start off with the German music to totally throw them. I can hear them: “When’s the Samoan music coming on” – just to remind them of this beautiful interesting history; of their German Samoan side,’ said Tuffery.

‘They are a vehicle for getting people to talk to each other. It’s an experience from our past that we never really talked about – some negative, some positive – and I want the young ones to have that special moment,’ he concluded.