A common part of our work at Jo-Jikum has been collaborations with outside researchers and artists. In July 2018, we were able to collaborate with two researchers: Joy Enomoto and Anja Kanngieser.
Joy is a Native Hawaiian multi-disciplinary artist, activist, scholar and educator who is currently pursuing her Master’s degree at the Center for Pacific Island Studies at the University of Hawaii. Her art practice engages in ancestral memory, climate and social justice, plantation genealogies, extractive colonialism and other issues currently affecting Pacific peoples.
I know her as a good friend from my days at the same program. She reached out to me because her focus was climate change in the Marshalls, and she was studying some of my work and poetry on the topic. She offered to conduct a photography workshop for our organization on the topic of climate change.
Anja is a sound artist and academic, and is exploring climate justice issues in the Pacific through the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research at the University of Wollongong. They explained to me that they were looking at the disappearance of sounds due to the disappearance of landscapes, environments, animals as a result of climate change. Anja offered to facilitate workshops on podcast making on the topic of climate change.
The workshop took place in July this past year, and it happened to coincide with the 2nd National Climate Change Dialogue for the Marshall Islands – so it ended up being a rather busy time.
The podcasts that were created were aired on the Marshall Islands national v7ab radio station, while the photographs were displayed during the closing session of the Dialogues.
You can view the photographs from the photography workshop participants as well as details behind the workshop here: https://aeloninaibojooj.weebly.com/
And the podcasts can be listened to here:
- Chatting under the Coconut Tree by Fern Raffela Lehman and Jinna Lavin https://soundcloud.com/hemos-matauto-437241035/marshall-islands-summer
- 2K18 by Hemos Matauto, Caston Zackious and Timmy Itaia https://soundcloud.com/lifern-1/chatting-under-the-coconut-tree
