These videos are part of an experimental body of work that I would like to explore further.

Following in the recurring themes of re-appropriating imagery (often harmful and stereotypical), rigid procedural experiments, analogue, and digital loops and layers of production, and projecting upon the body, these videos and the resulting still reflect aesthetic and process pathways.

Firstly is the video ‘ The Royal Samoans in Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle.’

This is a 1932 Fleischer Studios animated short directed by Dave Fleischer. It is known for its early use of rotoscoping, but more importantly to me was its use of traditional Sāmoan song performed by a group known as ‘The Royal Sāmoan’s ‘, and its use of dusky maiden tropes, harmful stereotypes, and blackface.

This film to me has a harsh juxtaposition between the beauty of the traditional songs and chants and the garish cartoonisation of culture in the resulting film.

I combined this film with my own works which I created by setting myself strict parameters. I usd my phone (easily accessible tech) and set 5 alarms a day in which I would record one minute of footage, wherever I was in my day. This was process-driven over aesthetics and beauty, the task being to capture my life with a repeatable process.

I took this footage, and again being driven by process rather than looks, plus my recurring themes of layering, blended it in Premier into mashups of the days. To me, this footage represented the antithesis to things like Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle, which relies on stereotypes and dreamy facades. My footage was unceremonious, blunt, and true. My processes of layers and cycles of analogue / digital treatment and re-treatment were utilised.

I then combined the two films, my truth, and the dusky maiden lie, into one tumultuous work. They clashed harshly, but that was the point. I then reprojected this upon my sister, in her representing the body of a true person, a Sāmoan woman, and experimented with re-videoing it. The still at the end of this post is a relic of these experiments.

The experiments to me about tropes like the dusky maiden and the noble savage, and the harm they do in the name of aesthetics, beauty, palatable and understandable culture. How they then feed into ideas about what is a ‘true’ Sāmoan or not, something that I have grappled with all my life as I do not fit a certain mold. The work is a reappropriating of the harmful, eeking out the beautiful from it (the soundtrack), cleansing it with my truthful footage, and re-projecting it upon the body so it can be reclaimed, absorbed and cleansed.