Acti.VĀ.tion - Behind Closed Stores - Backhand Maiden (from ‘Acti.VĀ.tion for the measina and tāonga in the stores of the American Natural History Museum’ series) 2017, printed 2023

Tracing the whakapapa (genealogy) of Rosanna Raymond’s Backhand Maiden, this series of photographs documents the ‘acti.VĀ.tion’ of the collection storage facility of the American Museum of Natural History, in New York. This ‘acti.VĀ.tion’ is guided by Samoan philosophical understandings of vā, in which time and space are activated by people, relationships and reciprocal obligations.

Like many institutions, the American Museum of Natural History has acquired thousands of artefacts that are now disconnected from the context in which they were originally made, used and valued. These artefacts lie spiritually dormant in collection stores or displays of indigenous culture in museums and galleries around the world. By entering these spaces, Backhand Maiden both awakens and pays homage to ancestors who embody these precious objects, and breathes life back into these collections in the performance of ritual and song.  

The American Museum of Natural History was once the workplace of American anthropologist Margaret Mead, whose field work in Samoa and writings about ‘native’ sexuality and promiscuity contributed to inaccurate notions and disrespectful depictions of Pacific women and their bodies. Backhand Maiden stands defiantly in the museum’s collection stores in her open-backed barkcloth Edwardian gown in a symbolic rebuke of this history.