Christopher Ulutupu, Manino

A Conversation:
Christopher Ulutupu & Areez Katki

Nearly a year has passed since I last spent time with Chris. I think it was 3am in my flatmate’s backyard in Gonville, and we were the dregs of the night—just starting to wind down after a long evening where I bid farewell to our community of friends in Whanganui. I remember hearing (or perhaps it was sensing?) some nascent impressions of films that Chris was planning to shoot in the region right after I’d fly to India. A passage down the Awa was mentioned, as was Castlecliff Beach, and even a resort masquerading as a western dude ranch. I’ll admit to feeling both excitement and the slightest bit of fomo: knowing well how Chris tended to work with friends and whānau, whom he approaches not as subjects but rather as collaborators; how his practice has been shaped by these special relationships, and how through them it continues to mine new depths, with a sensibility marked by the fabular and the mysterious, such as the kind we chance upon in Manino. Now that I think about it, this discussion over WhatsApp might’ve been Chris’ way to mitigate my fomo from that night.

                    Sunday 4 August

14:15
          AK: Kia ora Chris. I feel like there’s so much to catch up about and discuss. I’m interested in how our experiences might intersect in some places—particularly the ways in which some art practices and positionalities are perceived in the context of Aotearoa.
          I mean, we had a pretty interesting experience in Whanganui last year. For the most part I’m glad that I stayed back, past the point of my residency at Tylee Cottage, which was followed by yours. It meant that I got to hang out with you boys and spend some time with your work (:

                    Monday 5 August

09:37

          CU: I’m glad that you stayed longer in Whanganui and we were able to get to know you and your practice better as well. You helped us connect with so many people and really enjoyed Brews on Drews at Teal Lounge and shuffleboard at Porridge Watson. This made our time in Whanganui so memorable. 

          So, thank you!

15:46 

          AK: It kind of had the same effect on me after you and Haz arrived. I feel grateful that we found pockets of community in Whanganui, spaces that we were able to access and be a part of. The town grapples with some pretty complex histories, so it felt generative and meaningful to access it in good company. 

          I think it was early spring last year when you and Haz came over for drinks in Gonville, and we were sitting on the brick steps outside my studio: we discussed how the mythic, often fabled, events from our cultures seem to influence the ways we perceive and generate understandings of the environments we work in. 

          I’m constantly fascinated by how, as children of migrants, there’s this affinity toward fantasising, hybridising and retelling stories on our own terms. There’s the stuff we inherit, which generates a desire for speculative storytelling; and then there’s another sensibility, perhaps colliding with that material from our forbearers, which drives the fabulations we’re so drawn to. 

          I guess I want to know a bit more about what it was on that day at Castlecliff Beach, where you were filming with your whānau and chanced upon your little nephew taking a nap between the long grass in the dunes. It feels like there’s a tangible sensibility that you’ve been working with in the West series, with your lens fixed on these quiet gestures and mysterious encounters.

                    Wednesday 7 August

16:49

          CU: Beginning of production week, I ran a props-making session with all the crew and cast. We created props that captured the essence or even proof of atua or spirits. This was inspired by some research I was looking at around pre-colonialist Samoan rituals-—specifically Moe Manatunatu. This involved escaping into the wild and communing with ancestors and atua. It sounds really Ghostbusters-esque, but the props would act as instruments that captured the elements. 

          We had filmed down by the Castlecliff sand dunes, as we were framing up the shot, Typhon (nephew) had fallen asleep waiting for us. I decided to place one of the props behind his head as a halo. What transpired was a quiet moment of contemplation. This was one of many works we filmed that spoke to the direction I was thinking about the west, which is a departure from the usual loud and larger-than-life performances that take place in my previous works. 

17:20

          AK: There’s definitely some departure, in the sense of temporality and volume that we’ve previously experienced your works in. That being said, it feels like an appending moment in some conversations that your practice has been engaged with: one centered around atua, while blending Samoan rituals and belief systems with popular cultural references.

          How you tend to situate the ancestral and the mystical alongside contemporary representations of the occult and spirit worlds. Ghostbusters, for example! So, I’m interested in hearing more about how you and the crew—so many of whom are your whānau—constructed these instruments with the motive to commune with atua, to have presences made palpable, even beckoned closer. It sounds like a beautiful collaborative exercise that worked on levels of mutual understandings and imaginative formulation. Were there any particular moments of conversation, or threads of storytelling, that you all engaged in during those activities?

                    Thursday 8 August

16:28

          CU: The discussions I had with my father around pre-missionary Samoa are sometimes tricky. He is a man of faith and has placed that at the centre of how he views the world. We both understand that my queer identity can be in conflict with his own beliefs, but it’s because of this faith that he is more open to wider conversations about spirituality. We joke sometimes that he prays to the Christian God and I cast my little spells, conjuring all the other atua that exist. In that way, we are covering all our bases for the best outcomes possible for our Fanau and friends. 

          We also discussed times when my Nana had a stroke and it changed her. She kept seeing spirits and we would catch her talking to these spirits. Sometimes my Nana would ask us to leave a plate out for her ‘new friends’ at dinner time, she would create shrines for all people who she would have full blown conversations with, and would leave them little bits of food. We (my family) never once argued with her or even suggested she was delusional. We knew that there was no way of knowing that she was in fact seeing ghosts or not. The props were made with the idea of measuring or capturing the presence—knowing very well it was unlikely that we could discover proof. The very act of trying is what is interesting to me, and more fun.

                    Friday 9 August

00:32

          AK: It’s funny, I feel like it’s in those extant tensions with members of our family that a lot of learning happens. Also, a rich site for understanding really human attributes, right? Humour has a speculative quality that I identified almost immediately in your practice. I also remember how, many years ago when I came out to my family it was my dad who used humour to divert attention from the seriousness of the situation: how their child was contradicting the structure of their Zoroastrian faith, the fundamental frameworks by which they lived. 

          Now that I think about those moments, and also about your relationship with your father, it seems these tools are there to help us locate something in ourselves who, in spite of disagreeing on so many social and historic fronts, are learning how to listen to one another objectively; perhaps even learning how to reframe the indelible markings of love. And evidently a similar approach, to listening and understanding from the perspective of one’s beloved kin, was afforded when your Nana communed with her spirit friends. There’s a thread there again for me, with the interactions I witnessed between my Granny and the natural environment: she had a really intense relationship with birds and also plants. Always speaking with them, serving them food, as though they were acquaintances in casual encounter. There was always something about that habit of hers which left a big impression on me—and much like you, in spite of all its mystery, I never probed or questioned its validity. 

          ‘Manino’ is a feeling that you described to me recently, which you said in Samoan denotes a sense of exposing the hidden, the mysterious, or clarifying what was once ambiguous. I found that it helped me understand the motivations behind some of the gestures in your practice, particularly recent ones. Being the title of this presentation in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, what do you think your films, especially this early segment of West (2024 –), also elements of Hidden Amongst Clouds (2021), attempt to reveal when they lift a veil and speculate the supernatural?

08:01

          CU: West is both a direction but also an ideology. In the geopolitical sphere, the term west acts as a branding tool. Personally, I think about the significance of Samoa dropping the ‘Western’ from its name. There could be a practical reason for the addition of this name as stated by the NZ government, but it doesn’t counter the effect of the branding. A signal to other nations that Western Samoa was an island nation that has been colonised. Because of this reason, I hold the dropping of the name in 1997, a significant step in the decolonisation process and reclamation. The west is also a cinematic genre, which fantasises about settler culture and the destruction of Indigenous life. Western film narratives rely on a binary of bad guy—good guy shenanigans, and can’t help but make those parallels between indigenous vs coloniser. The term west is porous and unfixed, it has many reference points. Once I have shown all fifteen works from the West series, only then, can I start to articulate the complex tensions of this branding.

                    Monday 12 August

21:25 

          AK: I really look forward to seeing what emerges through your study of west, Chris, as both a global positionality and a cultural signifier. I’m sensing the emergence of some linguistic play in these works as you describe them, which seems rooted in a politic that resists definitions or representation as anything remotely binary. Through this inquiry alone I can imagine how your lens-based practice might go expansively into such histories, and representations of Indigenous identity. This use of west as branding also raises questions around the complex histories that have been shaped by them. And of course, unpacking that feels like a perpetual and endless task, right? I often wonder if we might ever articulate in a satisfying fashion how those effects have persisted in our psychologies. Not to mention how legacies of coloniality simultaneously impinge frameworks through which we still tend to communicate, articulate or perceive media.

          New Encounters is another ongoing series that you produced in an ad hoc manner with your familiar crew: there’s an overarching pursuit here to explore atmospheres rather than structures. While discussing and describing works from this series, you used the term ‘flippant’ a few times, to describe your way of seeking images in time. Could we discuss some of the motivations behind this approach?

                    Saturday 17 August

10:09 

          CU: I realised I didn’t really answer your previous question (typical)

10:49 

          CU: New Encounters was a series of diptych artworks that respond to cinematic tropes, Indigenous dreams and other modes of representation. Exploring the spaces in between the two images—a space for individual meaning making, which attempts to depart from the artist’s hand, at least at the messaging. My own interpretation of the Vā is a place of collision, a stage for new parties meeting for the first time. The focus of these works is not to tell a story, as such, but to be generous to the individual viewer; to surmise their own conclusions of what the story could be? 

          Hidden Amongst Clouds (2021) is a work that responds to my own love for all things supernatural. Inspired by TV and Films that I grew up watching, like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, X men and Charmed (you can also include Twilight series in that cannon—even though I was like 20 when it came out). Hidden Amongst Clouds looks into mythology and current stories that could be interpreted as myths/folklore for future indigenous communities. These works also aren’t scripted, so it’s about creating atmosphere and vibes, rather than illustrating what these stories could be. I guess that’s what I am referencing when I say my creative process can be flippant. I really enjoy surprising myself and not having a fixed position about what I should be filming. I think this also a by-product of my ADHD brain, I am really bad at following a plan and need constant spontaneity (dopamine) when I am making. This also stresses out my collaborators sometimes (sorry Haz, Kane and Kasmira).

10:53 

          CU: But fun should be a part of making, right? What are your thoughts? Should we be having fun while making—or do you have to be tortured to produce? lol

                    Wednesday 21 August

11.15 

          AK: In a way it’s almost as though this flippant methodology used across New Encounters becomes a tangible characteristic: it’s in the atmosphere of playfulness onset by those speculations, which blend the supernatural and folkloric with contemporary concerns. They imagine, as you said, a futurity through a succession of myths-in-the-making. I’ve noticed how this sensibility comes into play through your use of long shots, which somehow contain your spontaneity, with all those chanced-upon tensions. And these generously illustrate how you’re interpreting the dynamics of Vā. 

11:20 

          AK: I can somewhat relate to how neurodivergence tends to influence the way one’s work develops, also how it informs the formulation process. You described needing elements of surprise, spontaneity and unfixed positions, and that reminds me of some of the requisites I’ve grown aware of in my own practice. Conditions that I’ve noticed needing to be in place for me to be able to generate work. In my case they’re brought on by my OCD and hypersensitivity, which mandate a certain order in my working conditions—growing attuned to sounds, textures, scent—where a kind of consistency has to be maintained in the setting. But the limitations brought on by our respective neurodivergences, when illuminated, allow us to harness these unique sensitivities, right? Circumstances that might’ve seemed limiting now become conducive to opening up new, generative pathways. 

          And on that note, I agree, that the process of making has to be centered, in some sense, around playfulness. It’s good to be aware of how as artists we’re often fed the romanticism of torture, legacies of those heroic tropes that emerge from suffering. I think some of the most useful insights around this notion come through the acts of feeling one’s feelings, and learning how to articulate them compassionately, without hostility. And I suppose for some of us this happens when there’s some security, a sensorial fixedness; or for some when fun and playfulness are embraced as the place from where the mahi emerges. I really appreciate this approach, Chris. I think there’s a lot that could be learned from it!

                    Friday 23 August

11:24 

          CU: Woah! Areez this last part is superb and so generous—as all your responses have been. I’m so excited to continue these discussions, maybe through workshop sessions or even talanoa. The irony is that I can’t fully make sense of what the research outcomes might be, or work out what art will be made out of these conversations. But the not knowing is also a reason for excitement.

16:53 

          AK: Aw, thanks Chris—also for facilitating this chance to korero. It has been a pleasure holding this space with you. Also, to be thinking about the themes that your practice deals with, the emotions it conjures—all the while as I experience a landscape supercharged with identity politics here in India. It would be great to see what emerges from a workshop or talanoa in the near future. I that hope we get to see one another when I’m back in Aotearoa next month. Would be nice to catch up with you and Haz! 

          Until then xx