The Pacific Sisters want you to don your Melbourne Cup best, then add nan’s lace and some bling

As if Melburnians need an excuse to dress up, the Pacific Sisters want you to don your Melbourne Cup-style best, add something a little over-the-top, and join them for a dress-up party to rival any other.

It’s an invitation extended when founding members Rosanna Raymond and Suzanne Tamaki, and creative producer Ruth Woodbury of the Aotearoa art collective, chat via Zoom ahead of their appearances at the Asia TOPA festival later this month.

Rosanna Raymond of the Pacific Sisters.Credit: Michael O’Neill

The Sisters are renowned for their “Koupapa (philosophical) driven Frock” ethos, which sees clothing as a statement of power rather than an adornment. Several were in-residence in Melbourne in November, when they hit the op shops to source a swag of recycled fashion and visited the museums and all the major Pacific collections.

Essentially, the group are storytellers, says Raymond.

“We tell those stories through the things that we make and create and … also through our bodies. So it’s a way of re-centralising, re-centring our indigeneity in an urban context.

“It involves things like leathers and feathers and tusks and tooths and lots of ancestral handcrafts … It comes from a base that’s got thousands of years of ancestral [power], we say mana, and I feel that’s what we do.

The multi-disciplinary Pacific Sisters formed three decades ago.Credit: Michael Pham

“A lot of people still put us in the fashion thing, and yes, we fashion things that are put on bodies, but it’s pretty extraordinary fashion. It’s special-occasion wear, for sure,” she says with a laugh.

Visual artists, spoken-word artists, fashion designers, filmmakers and musicians with Maori, Samoan, Cook Islander, Tongan and other bloodlines are part of the Pacific Sisters crew; these days “Moana” is commonly used as an umbrella term for all Pasifika peoples.

Established in 1992, the collective has evolved over the past three decades, and some members’ children now form part of the group, which advocates for the environment, indigenous, POC [people of colour] and queer rights, and body sovereignty.

Pacific Sisters’ 21st sentry cyber sister, 1997, Tapa (bark cloth), feathers, bone, harakeke (New Zealand flax), nylon, shells, seeds, coconut shell, videotape, plastic.Credit: Te Papa

Music is a big part of what they do, driving their performances. In the ’90s, when they were trying to promote Maori and Pasifika music – in the days before Spotify and YouTube – Pacific Sister appearances were often the first time audiences had heard those sounds.

One of their main Melbourne shows is FROCKTIVATION at the Arts Centre on March 1, a mash-up of live music, spoken word, taonga pūoro (traditional Māori instruments) and processional movement, in which they perform in their recently made garments before they go on display. The Sisters have also fashioned pieces in response to Split Enz’s famous suits – designed by the band’s drummer Noel Crombie – which are housed in the Performing Arts Collection at the Arts Centre.

FROCK A WHANAUNGATANGA at Bunjil Place is a survey show of the Sisters’ work, featuring fashion, performance, music and film from the last three decades.

Curated by Jade Kerry Hadfield - curator, Pacifica Collections at Museums Victoria, Ngati Kahungunu, Ngati Whatua ki Kaipara - it includes eight portraits by Pati Tyrel, featuring ‘new aitu’ (avatars) originally created for the Hawai’i Triennial Exhibition, which evolved due to pandemic restrictions.

“People can download the Pacific Sisters app, and then they can see and hear moving image and sound. So they get a taste of Aotearoa and a bit of flavour of us, with us actually not being there,” says Tamaki.

Locals are invited to try their hand at Moana making practices and dress up in their favourite outfits in Freestyle Frock Action. “Think Melbourne Cup Day, all that fabulous gear. Here’s another day to wear it, or maybe you’ve got a cultural version,” Woodbury says. “Maybe you’ve got something tucked away, and you’re like, ‘I’m going to bring out Nan’s lace because it’s so hot’, or that special crochet dress you’ve been stashing in the back of the cupboard.”

She encourages audiences to “get funky and adorn yourself”.

“Do something, make your hair fabulous. Add [something] to your ankle and just put a pip in your step. Fluffy fluffies are one of our very famous items, made from all kinds of materials … they’re all ways to just go, ‘Hey, I’m going to crown myself’.”

Pacific Sisters in protest mode at Auckland War Memorial Museum.Credit: Nephi Tupaea

At ACMI, the Sisters feature in The Future and Other Fictions, co-curated by Amanda Haskard (Gunai/Kurnai), Chelsea O’Brien, film director and futurist Liam Young. Originally created for the Sydney Biennial, the installation at ACMI shares aspects of the Sisters’ collaborative process as Tangata Moana peoples. “KAITIAKI WITH A K is adorned with a cape created from video tape, MURUMOA emerges from the Pacific post nuclear testing by colonising powers, and SUP’IA SUGA is the gender fluid femme super sista who has your back always with all their fabulousness,” says Woodbury.

When the collective began, there were no set rules, she says. “We didn’t come from an art school or a place of traditional learning. We were teaching ourselves and teaching each other how to make and create, and then we could be whatever we wanted to be, and by sharing our stories … find the similarities within our cultures, the stories that we shared, the languages that we shared.”

Raymond identifies with “rematriation”, a concept coined by indigenous Canadian writer Lee Maracle. “So what’s the opposite to the patriarchy? Matriarchy. But also looking at rematriation as a way of really connecting and grounding with the mother earth, with your tribal connections, your tribal histories, and through that building up collective knowledge. When I heard that, I was like, wow – that’s what the Pacific Sisters have been doing for a long, long time.”

FROCKTIVATION is at Arts Centre Melbourne on March 1, FROCK A WHANAUNGATANGA is at Bunjil Place until March 9, and The Future and Other Fictions is at ACMI until April 27. asiatopa.com.au

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