Fiji's artistic heritage: impact and engagement in Fiji

This project will convert the results of the AHRC-funded Fijian Art research project (2011-14) into significant impacts in Fiji, securing a long-term legacy for the activities of the original project in the country of origin and reaching new audiences. Existing relationships with Fiji Museum and the Fiji High Commission to the UK will be activated alongside new relationships with the iTaukei Trust Fund Board in Suva (which is developing a museum/cultural centre), the UK High Commission in Fiji and other Fiji-based organisations to ensure there is substantial benefit to the cultural and economic sectors in Fiji.

The work of impact generation will take place in two phases. The first (Oct 2016 - Feb 2017) will take advantage of the summative project exhibition, 'Fiji: Art and Life in the Pacific', which will be shown at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia during that period. This will be the most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to Fiji, displaying important historic material from major collections, including those in Cambridge, Oxford, Aberdeen and the British Museum, as well as Fiji Museum. A major theme of the exhibition is the creative adaptability of Fijians over the last two centuries in the context of major political, religious and economic influences and disturbances. The exhibition will accordingly show major contemporary works, including a 26ft-long newly built double-hulled canoe (drua), which recently featured in the Queen's 90th birthday pageant at Windsor, and a large (15ft x 6ft) painted barkcloth, showing continuity of cultural practice.

Four curators and four artists from Fiji, identified as a result of the original project, will be invited for residencies in Norwich, to participate in workshops and knowledge exchange sessions around the exhibition, its content and themes. This will work both ways. Fijians will see the finest material in the UK and receive training in international-standard museum practice. They will reciprocate by engaging with the Sainsbury Centre Education team, providing Fijian perspectives on collections and exhibitions. The canoe, an unexpected outcome of the original project, will be a vehicle, practical and metaphorical, for illuminating issues connected to the use of sustainable resources (it is made entirely of wood and coir cordage), climate and sea-level changes and heritage management. The Fijian guests will also visit Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford to see the Fijian collections there, to establish mutual collaborative relations and to derive inspiration for new artworks in a range of media.

The second phase of the Highlight Notice project mostly takes place in Fiji (Mar-Sep 2017). Here the four curators and four artists will convert their experiences in the UK into practical outcomes - training and inspiring colleagues and the broader Fijian community in the process. Fiji Museum colleagues will feed their experiences into their current strategic development planning, leading to enhanced displays, storage facilities and educational programmes. In addition, Fiji Museum will mount an exhibition in August 2017 of new work by the artists who visited the UK, coinciding with the week-long Hibiscus Festival that brings tens of thousands of people to central Suva. Fiji Museum staff will also conduct workshops focusing on craft skills and schools' engagement with heritage issues. The iTaukei Trust Fund Board will host workshops and develop a network of local fieldworkers to document cultural knowledge, especially in the area of women's arts, achieving impacts in remote areas of the country. They will also transfer their UK experiences into the development of their new museum building and facilities. Foundations will be laid for a commercial canoe-building initiative, to be discussed with the Fiji Government as part of rural development policy, discouraging urban drift.

The principal focus will be on generating impact from the research previously undertaken on Fijian collections and Fijian history (largely in UK museums), and utilising the non-academic networks developed during that project. There will also be substantial engagement with new non-academic audiences and community groups, leading to impact in terms of policy-making in the cultural sector, heritage awareness and the establishment of active professional networks both within and beyond Fiji. Ensuring a legacy beyond the period of the Follow-on-Funding project is also a priority.

The pathways via which the project will achieve impact and engagement include the following:
Engaging four staff from Fiji Museum and the iTaukei Trust Fund Board (TTFB) in activities centred on the major exhibition 'Fiji: Art and Life in the Pacific' at the Sainsbury Centre at UEA. This will take the form of a series of workshops and sessions in February 2017 at UEA, Cambridge and Oxford, at which staff will experience and reflect on the exhibition, see first-hand a wide range of high-quality Fijian artworks, engage in knowledge exchange about them with UK-based curators and educationalists, and receive information on the latest international-standard museum practices in terms of storage, conservation, public programmes, loans and display. This will provide a permanent legacy in terms of enabling Fijian staff to translate their experiences into policy planning and public activities in their own institutions in Fiji. Likewise, a group of four Fijian artists will also undertake residencies in Norwich, Cambridge and Oxford in November 2016, during which they will engage with the exhibition and its content, participate in workshops and make new work in response to their experiences. Staff at the Sainsbury Centre, and museums in Cambridge and Oxford (project partners in the original project, who wish to follow through) are willing to participate in these visits, gaining insights into their own display practices and collections through knowledge exchange.

In Fiji, the returning participants will themselves conduct workshops and events to disseminate information gained in the UK, including showing dossiers of photographs taken both during the original project and during their recent visit. These will focus on technical aspects, aimed at recovering lost or diminishing skills and encouraging pride in heritage and traditional knowledge. Workshops will take place in Suva, rural areas and outer islands, to allow maximum spread of information and reach specialist craftspeople in their own, often remote, villages. The TTFB will establish a network of local fieldworkers (on a model successfully operated in Vanuatu) as part of their own formal institutional activities.

PI Steven Hooper has had positive meetings with government officials and the Minister of Education (with the Fiji Museum Director in 2015). These will be built upon to facilitate policy discussions concerning heritage issues, in particular regarding an enhanced role for Fiji Museum as the national museum of Fiji and in regard to commercial opportunities for canoe production and sale to tourist hotels (tourism is by far the biggest industry in Fiji). In a recent conversation the Fiji High Commissioner to the UK was enthusiastic about this initiative, building on the celebrity of the recently built sailing canoe which was an unplanned outcome of the original project (see Visual Evidence).

The aim is to achieve enduring cultural and economic impact at the highest policy level, primarily through the Ministry of Education, and also at the village and broader community level through the outreach activities of Fiji Museum, the TTFB and other local NGOs such as NatureFiji (see support letter). Impact and engagement will be measured by documenting workshop and exhibition attendance, by production of manuals and planning documents, by feedback forms, commercial activity and media coverage.