Research
Everything we do at Studio Puluma is not only grounded in our values, but driven by academic research and ʻike kūpuna, because knowledge and intellectual inquiry is possible throughout all avenues of life.
The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History edited by Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martín, and Charlene Villaseñor Black is our main reference included in the sections below.
Loving life and community as a form of resistance
“Living and loving together [is] an inextricable bond forged through solidarity, care, acceptance, and validation of self and others, and [a] mode of resistance.”
Creative storytelling rooted in love, especially for our community, is not just a form of self-expression, but an important act of resistance.
Bell Hooks, in the introduction Decolonizing Art history emphasizes that finding inspiration in the joyous world and people around us combats the constant dehumanization of colonized and oppressed peoples.
“As we work to be loving , to create a culture that celebrates life, that makes love possible, we move against dehumanization, against domination.”
Finding ways to maintain joy and togetherness actively combats methods of oppression, violence, and colonization that are rooted in stripping people of a sense of community, identity, and love. Studio Puluma at our core is an organization bringing people together through creative means to share stories of love and togetherness. Dixa Ramírez D’Ole emphasizes our ethos best:
“We must fold small acts of love and creativity and play (and laughter and irreverence and whimsy) into resistant projects against white supremacy because the goal of white supremacy is precisely to deny black people joy, laughter, whimsy, and play” (33).
ʻĀina-centered art and design
Sustainability and deep connection to ʻāina (land) are central themes here at Studio Puluma.
Hawaiian culture is rooted in the belief that ʻāina and all nature encompassing are our kūpuna (ancestors), kinolau (body forms) of akua (gods), our caretakers, our older siblings, and, most importantly, a relationship that is not transactional but reciprocal. As we care for the land, in return, it takes care of us. Moreover, nature holds much wisdom, and through kilo (deep observation), we can learn more about ourselves, our homelands, our community, and our cultures.
To love and take care of ʻāina is an all-encompassing sensory experience, and one innately human. Henry Drewal, African art historian, explains how creating art connects to a similar use of our senses on all levels.
In Decolonizing Art History page 22, he writes how he created the term sensiotics to describe “the crucial role of the senses in the formation of material forms, persons, cultures, and histories, with a focus on bodily knowledge in the creative process as well as in reception by body-minds.”
“While language… is one of the ways we re-present the world, before language we began by perceiving, reasoning, theorizing, and understanding through all our senses. Sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, motion, and suprasensory perception continually participate, though we may often be unconscious of them, in the ways we literally make sense of the world.”
Studio Puluma creates experiences to connect to this innate human desire to use our senses to make art, to share stories, and to embrace community. ʻĀina, wherever you come from, is an important part of who you are, and we always encourage you to find deeper connections to your one hānau (birthplace).
Additionally, we practice aloha and mālama ʻāina by ensuring all our supplies are sustainable and ethically sourced.
Healing historical trauma through creating art
For many indigenous people, myself included, the love and passion to depict ʻāina is rooted greatly in the historical trauma experienced – whether that be persecution, land displacement, attempted ethnic cleansing, systematic racism, etc.
Tina Sherwell, curator of Întimate Terrains: Representations of a Disappearing Landscape at the Palestinian Museum in the West Bank, shares in Decolonizing Art History an important analysis into the importance of artistic creations of ʻāina:
“The depiction of landscape over the decades provides us with a prism onto the experience of loss and longing, a prominent subject matter for artists, as its topography holds a central place in Palestinian identity formation. Landscape is at once both a vast site of projection and a deeply layered terrain of remains, memories, and histories.”
Similar to the goal of dehumanization in methods of colonialism, the desire for us to forget, both our own culture and their violent atrocities, is an overarching goal of systemic and ethnic oppression. Through indescribable experiences of persecution and loss, art has the ability to exist, persevere, and be an outlet for our memories, our sorrows, our joys, and our loves.
Studio Puluma utilizes this ideology and chooses to create opportunities for everyone – especially cultures and communities experiencing extensive persecution – to use creative self-expression as a form of healing and combatting trauma. As Sumaya Kassim in her essay “Museums are Temples of Whiteness” best put it:
“it is here, in the realm of the unpayable, the unspeakable, the impossible, that artists and poets step in to help us process the grief, bear witness and disrupt white narratives of redemption.”
