Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

ICA Miami welcomes scholar Candace Fujikane, Professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi, to the Knight Foundation Art + Research Center for a lecture titled “Cartographies of Kanaloa: Inundation and Restoration.” This virtual lecture is free and open to the public with advance RSVP and is presented in conjunction with the ICA Miami’s Fall 2021 semester.

From Candace Fujikane:

As we bear witness to the wastelanding of the earth by late liberal capital, now taking the form of melting glaciers, rising seas, acidification of the ocean, extended droughts, and the extinction of species, Indigenous peoples have been working to green the earth once more. Kānaka Maoli teach us to engage more intimately with the elements around us so that we can adapt to and transform the effects of global climate change.

In this talk, I focus on archival sources that help us to plot cartographies of Kanaloa, the deity and deep consciousness of the elemental form of the ocean. Papakū Makawalu researchers at the Edith Kanakaʻole Foundation and Kiaʻi o Kanaloa (Protectors of Kanaloa) practitioners look to archives of oli (chant), mele (song), and kaʻao (historical stories) to recover ʻike kupuna (ancestral knowledge) that teach us to cultivate our relationship with Kanaloa and to help us to recognize new forms of abundance in a changing world. As the sea walls of settler capital that attempt to stave off rising tides, Kanaka Maoli embrace the return of Kanaloa as presenting possibilities for the restoration of abundance.