This 1/10 scale version of a traditional Kanak hut is not a model for a potential larger version, but rather a form that can initiate a conversation about my birthplace and the connections that govern interpersonal and collective relationships in a society: huts carry meaning. They symbolize the social body and also an identity.

The weight on these huts is not that of traditions, customs, or a singular culture, which are rather the foundation of these huts. No, they bear the weight of a relatively recent past, whose echoes still today act as an open wound. Indeed, this project was born when I learned that the hut of the Customary Senate (which is the peaceful link between Kanak customs and French legislation) had been set on fire for the second time in less than three months. I had witnessed its reconstruction and inauguration after a man, driven by despair, set fire to this symbol to express his feeling of neglect. At the same time, I met Paula-Boi Gony, a prominent artist of the country and its history, who contributed to the creation of the Kanak flag. The first ashes gave way to forgiveness and mutual aid. This second fire remained anonymous and more painful. The past, if not integrated, can consume the flesh like a fire that has not been properly extinguished.

The earth that served as flesh and the grass that clothed this Customary Senate hut burned, leaving only the skeleton. I decided to dress mine with fabric that I manually printed with floral patterns, designed from photos of plants from the NC gardening show: not necessarily endemic, not necessarily exotic, just present on the territory. The pattern can echo the structure as a visual structure that takes shape from individual elements and their multiplicity. The floral motif may evoke a kind of insular exoticism, postcards, an aspect often present in the collective imagination of life on an island, which can hide the reality of its complexity, but also and above all evokes a colonial past with the arrival of mission dresses that missionaries made Kanak women wear, teaching an entire population that the body, especially that of women, was to be hidden.

Anchored, planted, the posts rise from the ground, and the lateral ribs form a structure, a solid skeleton that nevertheless resists these fires. The circular base was not chosen at random in tradition: it invites discussion, to sit together. Indeed, all points of a circle are equidistant from the center, on the same plane. « We must stop and sit around a table to discuss the future of our children. The future is for the living, » said Jean Kays, clan chief and elected official of the Southern Province and former president of the Customary Senate, with emotion the day after the night of violent riots and fires on May 13, 2024, against the thawing of the Caledonian electoral body, almost 40 years after the events of 1988.

My work is nourished by the superposition of theoretical research on artistic research, but to these is also added, of course, my human experience. Indeed, it is evident that I am marked by my experience as a woman who grew up in New Caledonia, a place with a violent and recent past, a multiplicity of cultures and their coexistence, built through the history of the Kanak people and their traditions, and by my departure from this unique place. So, the textile awakened in me, I think, the hope of a weaving that may not be uniform but forms a unity and connects all my experiences. It was not the medium itself that was nourishing my journey but the image of a patchwork of a multiplicity of individual fragments. My interest in everything that is multiple, in the plural within the singular, in the small drawings that form the large patterns, surely comes from a perception of myself as multiple, fragmented, which once worried me. But as time goes by, I realize that the experience of our surroundings is too vast to grasp all at once, and that all these fragments have always been connected: I am the common denominator.

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