Photographer Edith Amituanai

Samoan photographer Edith Amituanai has travelled from Alaska to Europe capturing people and places and the concept of home.

Her latest exhibition, La fine del mondo, is a series of portraits of Burmese refugees living in Amituanai’s own suburb of Massey in Auckland, complimented by Film Archive footage about the immigrant experience in NZ. 

“It occurred to me that many things that I had been looking at in my own cultural milieu could be found in other immigrant cultures.”

“The adjustment to a new environment’s climate, language, new systems and finding new communities is one major effort. While another is not always being fully accepted by the new homeland. Also the experience of feeling like being in two places simultaneously, one in the new adopted country and the other placed in the ancestral homeland seems to be quite common.”

La fine del mondo is at the Film Archive mediagallery, Wellington, until Saturday 11 October.

During what hours of the day do you feel most inspired?

Usual business hours, I tend to switch off after 6pm for some reason.

How would a good friend describe your aesthetic or style?

Glary and punchy.

What aspect of your creative practice gives you the biggest thrill?

Feeling like I'm going to throw up from anxiety and then it somehow works out better than I anticipated.

How does your environment affect your work?

What's really fascinating to me sometimes is right under my nose, just next door to me and down the street. It's a kind of awakening when you see something that you're been sleeping on the whole time.

Do you like to look at the big picture or focus on the details?

Both, the details that make up the big picture and back again.

How did your latest collection of photographs at the Film Archive mediagallery come about?

It came about from a culmination of a few things like seeing footage at the Film Archive On Disk DVDs made specifically for High School's on the immigrant experience in New Zealand and representations of Pasifika, plus coming back from a trip to Alaska to photograph the Samoan community living there.

The On Disk programme presented footage of Polish children who came to New Zealand as refugees, as well as a TV3 news story on the Tampa asylum seekers, who had just become New Zealand citizens.

It became apparent to me that I could ask the same questions about how one makes a home in new ways that I hadn't considered. I began to consider all sorts of questions, for example, how a forced migration rather than a more voluntary or opportunistic act of migrating, is negotiated in a new home, new country. How one makes a new home from a homeland that remains relatively uncertain...Questions like that have led to meeting the Lai family who are Burmese refugees who live not far from my own home in Auckland.

The show has a mix of moving and still images, can you explain why you chose to do this?

It's something I've done specifically for the Film Archive exhibition. Film Archive mediagallery curator Mark Williams heard I had seen some Archival footage and because of it I had responded by making new work. My photographs of the Lai family in their new home and environment sit alongside the Archive's footage.

I thought about my own parents who possibly watched the 1975 National party advertisement drawn by the cartoonist Hanna Barbera (which is included in the footage for the show) and wondered what that might have been like.

You've often dealt with issues around the concept of 'home', why is this important, or of interest to you?

I suppose as a basic need there are many facets to which you can think about the concept of a home. It can be both personal and political, cramped yet uninhibited, secure and unfixed, cultural and constructed.

What's your number one business tip for surviving (and thriving) in the creative industries?

Keep an environment that's grounded and inspiring and always make work that fascinates you.

Which of your projects to date has given you the most satisfaction?

All of my works give me some satisfaction but my current project keeps me sharp, excited and sometimes overwhelmed. I can't see an end in the near distance yet. I think for the moment that's a good sign.

Who or what has inspired you recently?

Yvonne Todd's last show Wall of Man was very inspiring.

If you could go back and choose a completely different career path to the one you've chosen, what would it be?

I love what I do but if the career could choose me I 'd love to be a sprinter like Usain Bolt but that'll never happen so yeah..

What place is always with you, wherever you go?

Samoa and then West Auckland because they rule.

What's the best way to listen to music, and why?

In the car while thinking about all the cool dance moves I'm going to do in front of my friends which never come out the way I picture it in my head.

You are given a piece of string, a stick and some fabric. What do you make?

A whacking stick.

What's the best stress relief advice you've ever been given?

Just say NO.

What's great about today?

No work it's Sunday!

What’s your big idea for 2009?

The one I'm working on will see me out for at least the rest of the year. La Fine del Mondo - living at the end of the world

• La fine del mondo
  

The film and television clips in La fine del mondo are from the Film Archive’s secondary schools On Disk programme’s ‘Representations of Pasifika’ and ‘Immigrants‘. Amituanai happened upon this footage while killing time in the capital.

Watching footage of Italian immigrants who settled in Island Bay in the 1890s, Amituanai recognised the same hope for New Zealand was echoed by own parents who left Samoa in the 1960s. Amituanai herself was born in New Zealand and grew up in Te Atatu. Before seeing these excerpts she says, “I had worked in an area I knew relatively well, however this footage inclined me to search outside of myself and question a terrain less-familiar and readily available to me, and in many ways, less fixed.”

She was also struck by the plights of immigrant groups she had never considered, such as Polish children who came to New Zealand in 1944 as WWII refugees.

La fine del mondo is an Italian phrase which means both, “the end of the world,” and, “can’t be beat”. To a Burmese refugee seeking sanctuary in a foreign country, both descriptions could be apt descriptions of their new home in New Zealand.

In November 2008 Amituanai began working as a volunteer for Refugee Services in Auckland, and was part of a team involved with the resettlement of the Lai family who migrated from Burma to their new home in West Auckland. It was five months before she and the family felt comfortable about taking her camera out and taking portraits of their adjustment to life in New Zealand.

“What my parents have in common with the Lai family is their consideration for the future generations of their family when migrating to New Zealand. Both sets of parents committed to working hard and making sacrifices so their children could take advantage of opportunities they have worked hard for. However, there is definitely is a high level of uncertainty when you flee from a place like Myanmar. The Lai family may not return to the homeland for a very long time, unlike my parents where their 'concept’ of home remains stable.”

• Edith Amituanai
  

Through her photographic practice Amituanai has often concentrated on chasing the idea of “home”. This has lead her to photograph people, and their homes, from Samoa, New Zealand, the United States of America (Alaska in particular), to Europe, where she has travelled across France and Italy.

In 2008 Edith Amituanai was a finalist for New Zealand's most prestigious contemporary art award - The Walters Prize. Her series  Dejeuner followed a group of New Zealand-Samoan rugby players based in France and Italy. The series is named Dejeuner, French for "lunch", after one of the family get-togethers one of the players was most homesick for.

She was awarded the inaugural Marti Friedlander Photographic Award last year. Of her work Friedlander has said, “I particularly like the way her photographic essays portray people and places that reveal New Zealanders and all their diversity”.