Bloodlines, Environment, Geography and the Cosmos
I am Visesio, a Tongan philosopher and artist. I emerged from a background of ancient Tongan Ha’a (lineage) of artists tufunga (material arts) and nimamea’a (fine arts), through both my father, Sunia Siasau, and mother, Lesieli Siasau. This skill as an artist has been transmitted through toto (blood), environmental upbringings, geographical location and cosmic interconnectedness.
Specifically, I am a descendant of ancient painters, sculptors, coconut lashers, builders and navigators from Fungamisi, Vava’u Islands and Ha’ano Islands at Ha’apai Groups.
Growing up in a fertile environment whereby a natural connectedness to the cosmos is given by the Moanan (Oceanic) way of being, through my entire life I have experienced and learned the arts of tufunga and nimamea’a.
From my father’s bloodlines, I have inherited the knowledge on painting and sculpture; and from my mother’s bloodlines, lalava (lashing of canoes), including house construction and encompassing sculpture and navigation.
The Siasau bloodlines via Sunia connect me to stonemasons from Samoa who migrated to Vava’u during the Tu’i Tonga Empire, between the 9th and 17th centuries AC. Later on, they focused more on painting, sculpture and building.
My mother Lesieli is a direct descendant of the Lemaki Lineage, Ha’a Lemaki, at Heavula village of Ha’amea district in the main Island Tongatapu and Tu’ulatala of Ha’ano islands.
Ha’a Lemaki were ancient expert builders of kalia (double-hulled canoe) and navigators, known as Alafolau Heavula, (navigation of Heavula), and Alafolau Tu’ulatala, (navigation of Tu’ulatala).
My discipline continues to refine, re-create and explore countless artistic creations worldwide in the above fields. This brings to mind a (k)new theory on Tongan vavanga (infinite thinking) by going deep inside of one’s self, to connect to the essence of one’s own being.
Furthermore, I know that our Tongan existence is specific to geographic location. Our ‘iai – (existence) is culturally shaped, vitally linking us as people from the ocean and the fonua (space-time).
The triadic from a Tongan perspective is made of fakakaukau (mind), sino (body) and laumālie (spirit) and we could view this as one of the most sophisticated devices in life, that is, beyond the mind and memories, and the categorisation of the cosmos into units to reflect the whole of the cosmos. Adhering to the cosmos, we know that birth and death are a continuation of life forces, beyond the horizon of life. Furthermore, our ancestors utilized vavanga, which is a spiritual consciousness and intelligence, a mystical relationality to the relevant resonance of the cymatics vibrations of unlimited potentiality.
This is the power of vavaa1Te Po, the realm of darkness, and Te Korekore, a place of chaos and potential, were both close to and distant from the objects and people of Aotearoa, New Zealand. In an essay, Reverend Samuel Marsden tried to describe Te Korekore: Te Korekore is the realm of non-being and being…It is here that the seed-stuff of the universe and all created things gestate. It is the womb from which all things proceed…
Marsden quotes an old Māori chant and translates it: From the realm of Te Korekore the root cause, through the night of unseeing, the night of hesitant exploration, night of blind groping, night inclined towards the day and emergence into the broad light of day. Te Korekore is, Marsden explained, a sort of fertile void, which allows the things of the world to manifest themselves. Other Polynesian peoples had their own words for the strange domain Marsden described. In Tonga, the term ‘Uli’uli va, which translates rou ghly as vast blackness, has been used to describe the realm from which the tangible world emerges, and which sustains the tangible world. (unified space) and its spontaneous, pliable, unlimited potentiality, which is un-attached to Christian religion and dogma. It is the deep understanding and knowing of where we are located within – internally and externally – in relation with our environments. Nga is a suffix that transforms the knowing of vavaa-space into doing, in connection with the realities of existence within our Tongan cosmology: as part of the universe, inheriting the wholeness of vavaa. Nga is used here as the pattern of knowledge that emphasises the way in which knowledge derives from space.
Ata-loa is a Tongan word that I constructed based on ancient Tongan words: ata (shadow) or images that are both concrete and abstract, and loa (time) and express their power and energies.
My creativity is a continuation of genealogical and cosmological links, the knowledge that (k)new this is specific to place and people. We use our creativity to expand the epistemologies beyond dogmatic, Christian and bureaucratic systems enforced upon us. This is where the political dimensions of creativity are now here in Oceania: we are establishing epistemological justice.
In conclusion, we can emerge from this: the idea of continuous creation and the idea of a dynamic universe. These ideas are inclusive and propel us forth as a generation of indigenous practitioners that taa (strike) or taataa (strike repeatedly) to maintain a particular rhyme or rhythm (peau ongo’o vavaa) and fuo (form). The vaa becomes a social, cultural and artistic expression of space.
Visesio Siasau – Biography
Visesio Poasi Siasau is a contemporary Tongan artist who comes from a hereditary guild of Tongan tufunga (ritual practitioners) from Ha‘ano, Ha’apai and Fungamisi, Vava’u islands.
Siasau holds a master’s degree in applied indigenous arts/philosophy and is currently undertaking a PhD in Hawai’i and Tonga. He works with perspex, glass, bronze, installation and large-scale painting on tapa cloth and canvas. In 2015 Siasau was the first Tongan artist to receive the Paramount Award in the Wallace Art Awards. He has undertaken artist residencies in the Solomon Islands, Taiwan, China and the United States, including a six-month residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn, New York in 2016, where he was invited to lecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In 2018, Siasau was Visiting Fellow at Mellon Indigenous Arts Initiative at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA.
