‘Oli ‘Ula: Housing the Kronfeld Collection Through Moving-Image Practice
Between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Kronfeld Collection was assembled by my great-great-grandparents, Gustav and Louisa Kronfeld, a Jewish merchant and a Samoan matriarch. As European empires expanded throughout Moana Oceania and settler and Indigenous worlds collided, the taonga, measina, and treasures travelled to ‘Oli ‘Ula, the Kronfeld family home in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. The ‘oli tree, once cultivated in Sāmoa, has fragrant red flowers; ‘ula can mean necklace, joyful, or red. The name ‘Oli ʻUla, likely given to the house by Louisa, is suggestive of these red flowers, or a garland of them. Encircled by this symbolic garland, the taonga, measina, and treasures of the Collection adorned the walls of the house. Later, they entered Aotearoa New Zealand’s public museums. This practice-based research digitally ‘houses’ selected taonga and measina from the Collection through moving-image artworks. Utilising Māori Marsden’s ‘woven universe’ (2003) and Epeli Hau‘ofa’s ‘sea of islands’ (1994) as relational frameworks, the project extends Moananui notions of the house into the digital realm. The thesis proposes that whakapapa (genealogy) and vā (relational space) are forms of provenance, and that enlivening the systems of relation of museum collections is critical in transforming their futures. Retracing the Collection’s movements to understand the forces that propelled them, the research addresses imperial collecting practices in Moana Oceania and looks to ancient reciprocal networks through which treasures circulated. Engaging Lana Lopesi’s concept of ‘Moana Cosmopolitanism’ (2021) and related notions of roots and routes, the project considers the future of the Kronfeld Collection and imagines decolonial museum ecologies. The practice enacts the reciprocity of the gift, generations later, and brings the Collection ‘into the light.’ Through archival research and moving-image practice, this project develops a tuitui (sewing, threading, binding) methodology, linking the reparative nature of sewing the fabric of the universe (Marsden, 2003) with Paul Tapsell’s metaphor connecting taonga, stitching, and the flight of the tūī (1997). The artworks, articulated as ‘cosmospheres,’ render taonga and measina as three-dimensional point clouds, and immerse them in kaleidoscopic moving-image ‘lifeworlds.’ The research proposes that through tuitui, the rendering of ancestral treasures using contemporary technologies might offer a form of repair within a woven universe.
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