Materializing History: Katerina Teaiwa's Project Banaba as Colonial and Ecological Critique

Project Banaba is a traveling exhibition that investigates the mining of phosphate in Banaba, an island in the Republic of Kiribati in the central Pacific Ocean. Between 1900 and 1979, the island was mined for phosphate, which was then shipped to Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand for agriculture. Banaba was rendered uninhabitable by the 1940’s, and the island’s indigenous inhabitants were forced to resettle on Rabi, an island in northern Fiji. Artist and scholar Katerina Teaiwa materializes this history in her exhibition Project Banaba, curated by renowned artist Yuki Kihara. Through an analysis of the project’s visual, spatial, and material components, this paper will investigate the way settler colonial history is inseparable from contemporary agricultural development, ecological degradation, and resource extraction.