In Running Out of Breath, New Zealand-born Samoan artist, poet, cultural commentator, and researcher, Rosanna Raymond presents a performative lecture revisiting her experience of a residency at the Dahlem Ethnological Museum in 2014. While the museum location and positioning has changed, reformed as Berlin’s Ethnologisches Museum in 2017, currently displayed at the Humboldt Forum, and stating its engagement in the ‘reappraisal of colonial history, structures and their consequences,’ the collection remains, for Raymond, deeply entrenched in the values she encountered then.

Through a series of performative actions, ceremony, archival imagery, reflections, sound, spoken words, and moving image, Raymond presents an embodied archive, a way of relating to the collection she once visited and now is housed in her own archive and body. Coming from a long trajectory of work researching how to conserve the intangible, Raymond explores how museum collections are reimagined and kept through a Vā Body-centred art practice emerging from Moana (Pacific) culture. Vā is a concept, for many Pacific cultures, describing the contextual spaces, activated by people and things, established to build meaningful relationships with others and the environment, necessitating reciprocal obligations. This notion and its application to the body, as adimensional space connecting the past, present and future, is the practice-based value at the core of Raymond’s proposal for deepening a Vā relationship with the cultural heritage, retired and dormant at ethnographic and anthropological  collections. and through it  its Mana and mauli, its power and lifeforce, are reactivated.