o ’ tahiti
treasure hunting
Five-year-old Tini, his father, his brother and his cousin scout the lagoon for natural treasures.
Between the motu and the coast of Huahine, the local families play, hunt, teach and live. The native knowledge of this area is passed down from one generation to another, sometimes it passes from father to son as casually as a day spent at the beach.
What is found here, between the playful splashing and the sandy relaxation, is no less than the skill of survival. The navigation of a small boat; the secrets in an old, old story; the gathering of coconuts and flora; the shallow sea hunting of live creatures for eating and their beautiful shells collected for the arts of their culture. They bake bread for their neighbours in a sand oven and casually pair molluscs with precision.
Tini will one day become a man in these islands, where the hardship and excellence of his ancestors prevail alongside Coca-cola and instant noodles. Tini will be capable of all the great things his parents have taught him. Becoming a man in his post-colonial island community may be a rite of passage, or it may just be life.
french vanilla they say, they sell.
Vanilla, or Planifolia flowers are a species of orchid, that grow in tropical climates, far from the frosts of Europe. Vanilla is hermaphroditic, meaning it carries both the male and female productive parts. But as the two are separated, pollination is the responsibility of someone else. At blossom, the flowers are open less than a day, a small chance for someone to assist. A bird? A bee? Humanity?
Here in Huahine, French Polynesia, the locals find a way to live in harmony with the island. Mother Nature provides, man and woman serve. And so, farmers and wanderers and stewards of the lands, manually pollinate the flowers by hand, one-by-one through the jungle, through the grove.
A few weeks later, the flowers that were accurately pollinated disappear and green stems arrive in their place, they swell with the pregnancy of vanilla beans. They’re then dried out in their thousands, in backyards of people like Mémé Roro, and exported all over the world.
They arrive in fancy French kitchens, are the star of birthday cakes, are ground into pastes and processed for their essence, diluted and imitated; still, they delight ice-cream lovers with their decadent taste.
But they don’t come from France, they come from here, where vanilla grows both wild and organised in the loving palm of the Pacific Isles.
a culture of colour
Every year the best artists of Tahiti's traditional sewing practice, Tifaifai exhibit their pieces in the centre of Pape'ete. These women are a part of that fabric. Some wait in the lobby of City Hall, enthused and exhausted by the exhibition of endless colour. You can find these in almost all Tahitian homes, on walls, beds, couches, draped over chairs and dressers. These colourful, hand-stitched masterpieces form but one chapter in the Tahitian tapestry of antiquity.
The colours belong to the islands, as do the motifs and the methods of expression, each design delicately stitched by hand, the true act of handing down the stories of these lands, of these seas, of these people.
Polynesia is at a crossroads of old and new, but the spirit of this culture is preserved within each individual. We become the stories we are told about ourselves and we reproduce these stories of identity in our art. Wherever one roams in this archipelago nation of arts, these stories cannot be denied. To practice a traditional art, is to persevere a culture.
mon amour
