AWA – which means ‘river’ in Te Reo Māori – is a collaboration between photographer Natalie Robertson and tohunga taiao restoration ecologist Graeme Atkins. They share whakapapa (genealogy) to Ngāti Pōkai people, and seek to use art to restore cultural and environmental relationships with their ancestral Waiapu River.

In their project, He Uru Mānuka, He Uru Kānuka 2024, AWA retrieve indigenous ecological knowledge from museum archives to revive the practice of building stone fish traps, known as pā tauremu, to re-story a relationship with the Waiapu. Joining the pair, Lionel Matenga – a tohunga whakairo (skilled carver) and net weaver – replicated a 4.5-metre kūpenga (fishing net) documented in a journal written in 1923. In 2023 and 2024, this kūpenga was attached to a pā tauremu using the stakes and brushwood of kānuka and mānuka trees in the Waiapu as AWA, along with community members, attempted in vain to catch fish in the sediment-laden river.

A life-sized replica of these fishing technologies forms the centre of AWA’s installation for the Asia Pacific Triennial. Photographs by Robertson, along with an accompanying website, locate the geographical context with Waiapu cultural histories co-authored with Abraham Karaka. An underwater video recorded by Alex Monteith, with an immersive soundtrack by Maree Sheehan, poetically transports audiences into the space of belonging, culture and community cohesion, albeit within a devastated river environment. In Robertson’s words:

We are a weaving, cord-making, net-making, fishing people. This is our heritage. We reiterate the value of enacting cultural survival and revival every time a net is put out into the river.