Angela Tiatia: Lick Angela Tiatia reflects on Lick, acquired by the MCA earlier this year.
My moving image work, Lick 2015, was acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art in early 2020. Although only a few months ago, it now seems like a world away. And in the intermittent months, news of this acquisition became lost in a sea of heightened alarm with the worldwide spread of COVID-19. The first stories about a novel and aggressive virus seemed so far away. That somehow it would be something that happens ‘over there’. Something that happens to someone else. There were stories and posts giggling patronisingly at the queues of people lining up for toilet paper in Singapore. And then within two weeks the same panic hit Sydney. As the reality of living amongst an invisible, terrible and escalating threat started to become inescapably clear, I found myself switching compulsively between Trump’s daily Coronavirus briefings - where he downplayed or outrightly denied the severity of the virus - and The Walking Dead. The world of zombies descending into chaos, violence and scarcity became a weird benchmark where I was thinking “At least we are not as bad as this”. But I wasn’t alone in my appetite for narratives of lost hope and panic. Netflix and Foxtel very aptly responded with movie folders containing every doomsday movie ever made.
AUGUST 2020
It was during lockdown that I became reflective about my work. Works made before this situation began to seem somehow different to me - the unfolding chaos in supermarkets in The Fall, 2017; the sense of panic, grief and despair during parts of Narcissus, 2019. I was reminded of how a work does not exist in a vacuum. It is experienced within context. And although I was very clear and deliberate about the context to which I was responding to when making it, the works can live beyond this original context.
Often my works are driven by an urge to feel or do something that is personal, intimate and instinctively responsive to the environment. Lick was filmed on the island nation of Tuvalu - one of the most vulnerable nations on earth. Rising barely 2.5 metres above sea level, everyday life on Tuvalu is punctuated by the realities of the climate emergency. On Tuvalu, climate change is not abstract, it is immediate and ever present with scientists predicting its loss to the sea within 25 years. Not only is it surrounded by ocean, Tuvalu is literally drowning with the ocean bubbling up from beneath the ground at high tides. Although I spent much of my youth splashing in the shallows of the beach that my village in Samoa sat on, I never learned to swim. And yet I was never scared of the water. But as I stood on the edge of the atoll in Tuvalu watching the waves roll in across my Pacific, for the first time I felt deep fear of the ocean. Lick was made in response to this fear. With my arms outstretched towards the ocean, my feet tightly grip the edges of a large rock on the seafloor. I wanted to hold this awkward position for as long as possible while my face was being licked by incoming waves. The final act of floating away is posing a question to the viewer. Is it of defeat or survival? We instinctively know nature that is stronger than us. We can pretend all we want that plastic bag recycling and solar panels will add some time. The truth is, our experience of climate change is tethered to our access to resources, privilege, and power. Tuvalu, our canary in the global mine, will be one of the first Pacific Island nations to disappear within our lifetime. Nations with limited access to power in the global playing field.
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