Christopher Ulutupu Lelia 2018. Image courtesy of the artist and Millers O’Brien Gallery, Wellington.

Lelia

Lelia by Christopher Ulutupu for SCAPE Public Art Season 2018

Christopher Ulutupu’s video/performance art practice explores ongoing themes around landscape, photography, and the construction of colonial narratives. Responding to early 1900s landscape photography and ‘postcard’ tourism, his earlier work has looked at depictions of Pacific brown people, disseminated throughout the western world: images of Pacific people sitting under coconut trees made available for European consumption. His practice seeks to re-contextualise these stereotypes and re-imagine them through video and performance, offering new ways of exploring the effects of colonisation and diaspora.

In Lelia, and Fitu (Seven), the artist’s second work for the SCAPE Season 2018, Ulutupu continued to stage performances within ‘picturesque’ landscapes, this time in an alpine resort scenario, taking inspiration in part from an ELLE Magazine article about a winter Vogue Issue 1977 photoshoot, where a group of photographers and models travelled to a ski resort at the border of Argentina and Chile. Due to a storm they were snowed in and forced to stay there for eight days. They continued the shoot at the ski lodge, which went on to become one of the most successful issues at the time. That photoshoot became even more absurd when the Chilean government refused to let the Americans leave. The US Embassy, in collaboration with the Argentinean government, planned a Bond-esque escape plan, involving all the models and photographers skiing down the storm-ridden slopes to catch their helicopter, escaping the clutches of the Chilean security guards left to monitor them – whilst wearing all the furs and jewellery that had been supplied by the designers. Fitu (Seven) and Lelia responded to themes of decadence within tourism, and a story worthy of a cinematic experience.

The video work Lelia, shot in the Mt Lyford area, was the final part of a trilogy that sought to explore a development of the artist’s relationship with ‘My Coloniser’. From courtship and desire explored in Into the Arms of My Coloniser (2016) to dissonance and miscommunication played out in Do you Still Need Me? (2017), the work explored an acknowledgement of this relationship, a declaration that the indigene – coloniser relationship is a lifetime commitment, a marriage of sorts.