Digital visuality in cultural identity construction: Notes from the festival of pacific arts

Abstract

In July 2012 in Solomon Islands, 27 different Pacific nations came together for two weeks for the 11th Festival of Pacific Arts to express and articulate their traditions in their present forms for other Pacific Islanders (few non- Pacific Islanders attended the event). The festival was all about producing, reproducing and transforming Pacific identities, and much of this took an explicitly visual form, which the festival context fully supported. Cameras were everywhere and shooting was continuous both in photography and video, among the audience, the performers and the organizers as well. The photos were quickly transformed into YouTube, Facebook and offline video files, Flickr photo albums and countless other forms and formats shared among and between Pacific communities online and offline. The paper analyses this visual production in the cultural framework of Rennell and Bellona Islanders that the author has been working with. In particular, it highlights issues of cultural identity construction and aspects of cultural agency related with this visual production in the context of the overall modernization of the Solomon Islands society.