AKAMAI 2024—a night of Pasifika performance and visual art

This Thursday sees the return of the Pacific Studies programme’s live AKAMAI event, beloved by generations of Pacific Studies students, alumni, and the wider communities in and beyond Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.

A montage of several Pasifika performers.
Congratulations to alumni of our last live AKAMAI event (2021), who recently completed their undergraduate degrees! Featured here (L to R): Valini Vaka, Lauren Siemsen, and Anthony Atoni.

AKAMAI is a night of performance and visual art by students of PASI 101—The Pacific Heritage, responding to themes of the course. The event features visual art, sculpture, poetry, dance, and song.

“We’ve got a really high calibre of talent,” says Dr Nālani Wilson-Hokowhitu, lecturer in Pacific Studies.

AKAMAI was the braindchild of the Pacific Studies programme founder, the late Associate Professor Teresia Teiawa, and has run successfully since 2001. AKAMAI’s innovative assessment design was a cornerstone of Teresia’s National Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award.

Due to the pandemic and other disruptions, AKAMAI was taken online in 2020, 2022, and 2023. The last live event was held in 2021.

Coordinating this year’s event is Dr Nālani Wilson-Hokowhitu, who “has infused immense passion and creativity into PASI 101 since taking up her appointment in Pacific Studies earlier this year,” says Dr April Henderson, Programme Director of Va'aomanū Pasifika—Programme in Pacific Studies and Samoan Studies.

“A lot of the students have been transformed through the course, and I think that is because a lot of what we’re teaching in the course is information they’ve never been taught before, despite the fact that the majority of our students are Pacific students,” says Dr Wilson-Hokowhitu.

“A key focus of the work that we do in Pacific Studies is about the acquisition of knowledge, but it’s also about identity and a sense of self and place in this modern world.”

In 1976, Albert Wendt wrote in his now-iconic essay 'Towards A New Oceania', that “So vast, so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies, and myths, so dazzling a creature, Oceania deserves more than an attempt at mundane fact; only the imagination in free flight can hope—if not to contain her—to grasp some of her shape, plumage, and pain.” This is a significant reading in PASI 101, and helps inform the art that the AKAMAI performers create.

“For all our communities, please share widely. Get a crew together, and come and support this year’s AKAMAI cohort,” says Dr Henderson.

The event is on Thursday 23 May from 6 pm–9 pm, in the Hunter Lounge.