Kauri-oke!

2013
Makeshift (Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe)
Durational installation with custom-built kauri karaoke equipment, folk songs and found objects.

Commissioned for 5th Auckland Triennial, If you were to live here… (curator Hou Hanru), Fresh Gallery / Otara Markets, Auckland (New Zealand), 2013.

Kauri-oke! is a portable solar-powered karaoke machine built with repurposed New Zealand kauri, long ago extracted (for use in Australian kitchens) from forests that once covered NZ’s North Island. Repatriated to its country of origin, Kauri-oke! wound up in the marginalised South Auckland suburb of Otara, offering a perpetually expanding collection of locally significant songs about home, travel and lost landscapes. Participants sang with Kauri- oke! on Saturdays when it was wheeled out and set up at the Otara Markets, and inside the adjacent gallery during the week. They could also request new songs to be prepared and added to the archive.

Behind the work is a concern for how nostalgia shapes our readings of the past and the places we once knew. At the same time it looks forward towards new forms of social imagining, dwelling and remembering. Incorporating handcrafted objects and songs from people living in Otara today, Kauri-oke! acts as a kind of responsive micro-museum of the material and cultural drifts produced by colonisation and capital.