Yuki Kihara's Paradise Camp as a potential Fa’afafine museum: Fabulous cohabitation in a shared world

• Published in: Journal of material culture Vol. 28; no. 4; pp. 576 - 603
• Main Authors: Yu, Liang-Kai, Steinbock, Eliza
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.12.2023; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Archives & records; Cohabitation; Colonialism; LGBTQ studies; Museum collections; Museums; Pacific Islander people; Photography; Sexuality; Sovereignty; museum studies; pacific studies; queer and trans studies; archive; Fa’afafine
• ISSN: 1359-1835; 1460-3586
• DOI: 10.1177/13591835231210440

This article examines critical ethnographic and archival elements of Paradise Camp, Yuki Kihara's highly celebrated Aotearoa New Zealand national pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 2022. Through its scenography that in Kihara's words is “fa’afabulous,” consisting of archival collages drawn from museum collections and staged photography made after Gauguin's paintings in collaboration with queer Sāmoan communities, we argue that Kihara's heavily annotated version of a so-called paradise assembled within Paradise Camp offers a ‘potential museum’ that reconnects the missing links between colonial registrations of the past with today's queer Sāmoan lives. This queer Indigenous reconfiguration of a fabulous paradise, which refuses imperial understandings of Pacific people and geographies, seems central to Paradise Camp's queer ‘camp’ effects, much like an eye roll that dethrones authority. Therefore, we propose that such an artist-fabulated museum lays claims to an Oceanic sovereignty, and broadly fosters a shared world for Fa’afafine and queer Pasifika peoples.