First your scale impressed me – at seventeen metres you were massive. Then colours, blues greens and browns like the tukutuku panels at my marae Rāpaki, which sits on (and you’ll like this) the Banks Peninsula – is that the gift you’re talking about? A whole peninsula? Te Pātaka o Rākaihautū?

I remember sitting in the darkness on the floor with a bunch of strangers and you told us a 64-minute story you’d been fluctuating on for ten years. My God! I thought, ten years is a long time to hold a story. Mind you, some people hold their stories forever and it makes them sick. But I listened deeper and passed through the surface, your homogenisation annoyed me, your satire excited me. And you told me your full name In Pursuit of Venus [Infected], and that you had to compartmentalise down because time and space (and probably money) couldn’t handle your epic scale.

Two months later we were separated – by ocean and by pandemic.

So now I’m seeing you in your compact state and I’m quietly protective. I want the whole world to see all seventeen metres of your storied history, and yet I want you for myself because what if they don’t get the joke? What if they only see old stuff, dead stuff, extinct stuff? My mum would say “Well, who is they?” And I guess the answer is you dear reader, silent witness.

Beyond your borders however is the mana of wāhine Māori in creative space/time, you emerge from Lisa Reihana like Hineahuone from the clay, you are sent outwards like the poetry of Hine-Haaka and embraced in the knowing of Hineraukatauri.

There is a wider social implication in your content where exists a tension, taut with complexity and uncomfortable, painful even. It is a legacy of colonisation in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa and you are a moment in colonised time, a representation of ideas, an employer of actors and technicians, a piss-take, but mostly you are quite obviously a reflection of myself. You look at me, I look at you, our ideas meet in the space between and voilà, you remain the same while I have changed a little.

Kia ora, ā, kā mihi, Juanita