NZPQ23 Ka emiemi

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 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.

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.

(Text taken from Best Awards website.)