Day 6: New Friends

After the chief headed off to bed last night, I took the liberty of walking back across the street to see what interesting folk I might run into at the resort bar. Turns out, I ran into some quite interesting people indeed: Jacqui Blanchard, a photographer from Auckland, NZ, and John Ioane, a former high school art teacher and now professional artist from the same place. They were warm and interesting people, and we connected well, especially when John said of Americans, "You guys give us a lot to deconstruct." Well, of course I took that bait, and I was fascinated in his work, in using multimedia to deconstruct, specifically, the "exoticization" or the ideal of islanders. We deconstructed and dreamed of deconstructing into the night, and picked up again with new intensity the following morning over coffee. They hitched a ride with us back to the warf, and I was able to pick up three quick videos of John about being Samoan and representing the islands of Pacifica through his art. Here are the clips.