Pololia (2020-2021)

Bernice Akamine

Akamine presents a new large-scale multimedia floating installation featuring jellyfish as a metaphor for ancestral connections found in the Native Hawaiian creation chant, kumulipo, to the present. The 35 ethereal beaded jellyfish that constitutes Pololia (jellyfish in Hawaiian) comments on the very real changes the climate crisis is affecting our shared and global ocean ecosystem, with Akamine sharing:

One of the things I had been looking at is the kumulipo and how life starts in the ocean. I had spoken to someone else and they said for Hawaiians the first life starts in the ocean and it's this little polyp, a floating polyp that anchors.

One of the things I have been looking at is the ocean and how the ocean connects as wayfinding people that Hawaiians are and were. This is our lifeline. This is where our food comes from. This is how we traveled all over. The ocean connects us to each other, the islands. It connects us to the Paciifc, but it also connects us to the world. Everywhere in the ocean you will find jellyfish especially if it is a disturbed area. When you think about the environment jellyfish are opportunists to a large extent. If you take out the predator species that will attack them or even take out [us] - humans - and we take out the larger species, the big tuna, you start creating vacuums.

If you take out the other things you have a huge bloom of jellyfish. I think jellyfish are so attractive; but when you have these huge blooms and you are trying to fish and all you are catching is jellyfish, that is going to create a huge disruption in food supply. The disruption isn't really the jellyfish. We are creating the disruption.