Provocations: Dance as new ceremony, truth-telling and re-matriation

Victoria Hunt in dialogue with Rachael Swain (AUS) Simultaneous Translation English-French

Indigenous communities define "rematriation" is a twofold movement: restoring the invisibilised ontological and epistemological knowledge of the collected artefacts as well as returning them to their original communities. In this conversation with Marrugeku's Rachael Swain, Victoria Hunt, an Australian–Māori artist and a descendant of Hinemihi o te Ao Tawhito, speaks of dance as ceremony, understood as transmitting ancestral energies and Indigenous futurities. For Hunt, whose whare tupuna is currently held in England and France, rematriation is a political and spiritual act, a reawakening of what colonial legacies have tried to sever and erase. In this sense, she considers herself as a living site of ontological resistance. Through her work, she questions long-held paradigms of possession within the global artefact market, proposing instead a return to Indigenous frameworks of custodianship, care, and relational accountability. It is a call to reimagine our responsibilities—to justice, to healing, and to return.

Wooded room