The Pacific Sisters are a pioneering Tāgata Moana art collective from Aotearoa New Zealand. Their colourful, character-driven costumes – seen in The Future & Other Fictions exhibition at ACMI – fuse Māori, Pacific and queer identities with traditional and futuristic styles. Hear from the artists themselves.
See costumes by the Pacific Sisters in The Future & Other Fictions
Transcript
What do you do with plastic straws that have already been made? Let's upcycle them, let's give them a better purpose, one that we'll actually want to take care of. These are small ways that we can start to play with the minds out there and just help shape a balanced story that's not often presented to our world. Kia ora, I'm Ruth I'm from the Hokianga in the far north. I'm part of the Pacific Sisters. Kia ora, my name is Ani O'Neill. I am part of the Pacific Sisters collective. Pacific Sisters are a really amazing collective that have been going for 30 years – individuals who have like a broad range of skills: jewellery-making, set design, fashion. The magic happens when we come together as a rōpū, as a group. We get up to lots but having some art-ivism in there – everything has a meaning, there's a point, there's some sort of message to be shared. What we actually want to create for ourselves. So, we're the difference we want to see in the world. So, there are three works in this show and it's a call to action, you know, our works are kind of a call for people to rise up and speak about their truths and what's happening right now, what's happened in the past – trying to rectify the future, basically. We definitely want to kind of burn your eyeballs a little with some of our work – you're never going to forget us. Actually one of our little sayings is "just remember: don't forget".