Making (Room for) Earth in Hawaiʻi: Sean Connelly’s A Small Area of Land

In 2013, Pacific Islander architect and artist Sean Connelly exhibited A Small Area of Land (Kakaʻako Earth Room) at the ii Gallery in the Kakaʻako neighborhood of Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. The work is what Connelly calls a 'critical regional reappropriation’ of Walter De Maria's The New York Earth Room (1977), exploring what the primarily Euro-American historical movement of Land Art would look like in a specifically Hawaiian context. Acting as a visual metaphor of time, the sculpture was allowed to slowly deteriorate in the gallery, condensing the histories of land tenure in Hawaiʻi to the length of the work’s installation. With the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the importance of land use, this work distills the dual histories of colonialism and capitalism and shows the importance and connections between sustainable land use and paths for moving forward ecologically based upon cultural traditions. Connelly’s work is an attempt at using the visual tools of settler-colonial art histories to re-inscribe traditions of Indigenous land use, activating art as a tool against climate change and the continued disintegration of the island’s cultural fabric, and, instead, planning for a thriving, livable future. Although locationally specific, Connelly sees his general ideas as transferrable, an ecological subset of processes of decolonization in which particular Indigenous knowledges will be implemented on a place-to-place basis.