HONONGA / Tō’u Vaira’a Tamari’i (My Womb)

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Irihipeti Waretini

HONONGA is an interweaving of bloodlines carried across oceans, seeds scattered by wind, and kinship stretched across timelines. It is a crafting of cosmologies through the cycles of life and death - an act of restoring balance in our stories of place, identity, and belonging.

As a personal acknowledgment of Country, HONONGA grounds itself in a shared canopy of presence, culture, and care - anchoring community through ancestral ties.


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Françoise Schneiders

Tō’u Vaira’a Tamari’i (My Womb) / Fuck You, I’m not your Dusky Maiden – unmuted!

The West has cast a long shadow over Tahiti; nearly wiping our bodies from existence entirely and recasting our fenua as a ‘paradise’ of ‘dusky maidens’, ripe and ready to be consumed. Our lived experience and cultural autonomy silenced, negated, transmuted and mutated. Lost in a paradise of white men’s fantasies. Not simply an historical fact but an ongoing contemporary assault.

This work reclaims the space of our representation. It is an offering to my daughters and my deceased mother, to my people and to all brown girls and women. We should be angry and we should be proud, and we must actively represent ourselves, for ourselves.