Coconuts in Tuvalu are proliferating all the time, but they only do so selectively at certain places, near households, on the tree, and on satellite maps, and never in places like supermarkets. Coconut is also preserving - with its presence in aspects of human life and entanglements with natural condition with the island, it’s preserving the language, culture, history and what defines Tuvalu as Tuvalu.
Print-making is a method of replication and suggests the many possible futures we can imagine for Tuvalu - futures in which coconut has a prominent role. The prints coming out of the matrix are the blueprints for those relations; with them, we’re projecting various possible versions of Tuvalu’s future.
Through documenting & telling the stories of the plant, this project aims to archive Tuvalu through coconut, and also challenge traditional archival methods by introducing a contextualized and non-human perspective.
