Bikka Ora and Julieanna Preston, Mana is Moving [short film], Titahi Bay, 2025 (forthcoming).
Each low tide in spring, especially after a northwest storm, attests to the fact that 100,000 years ago Titahi Bay used to be a forest rimu, totora, kahikatea, nikau palms, tree ferns, sedge, flax and raupo evidenced by large petrified stumps emerging from the silty tidal sands. Once growing in a swampy environment, the climate warmed, sediment accrued around the stumps and fossilisation took place. What was vegetal is now rock because of a process of quick deprivation of oxygen accompanied by rich mineralisation and crystallisation. Ecological magic.
Bikka Ora has lived at Titahi Bay for several years and has made it a daily ritual to walk the beach, and take note of the dynamism that plays amongst the tides, the weather, the clouds, the people, the dogs, and on occasion, the petrified stumps. This habit has been a resounding factor towards her becoming embedded in the community and in communication with the land that she now identifies as home. The environment calls out to her and she responding reciprocally to its overtones and undertones, rhythms and migrations.
In the film, Bikka and Julieanna perform the place as too dark wandering profiles scanning the tide line in movement and gestures inspired by Tōrea Pango, the New Zealand Oystercatcher, a bird frequently found in the bay often running in pairs in a curious dance. The performance centres on the two figures migrating back and forth across the beach waiting, watching, poking and prodding for the fossils. The search, anticipation, resilience to continue and unrequited hopefulness situates them as witnesses embedded in the live drama of the place. Their actions are but a few amongst many spatial transformations over the duration of days and months that reflect on larger spans of geological time which ultimately point to the relational liveness of all things.
Currently, the plan is to premiere the film in 2026 at a boat shed in Titahi Bay as a gift it to the local community, submit it to one or more film festivals centred on environment, and to include it in a group exhibition to be determined.
Bikka Ora is an artist based in Titahi Bay, Porirua, whose practice spans live and video performance, sculpture, sound, and site-based interventions. Rooted in relational and ecological frameworks, Bikka’s work often explores kinship with land, water, and non-human beings, using playfulness and curiosity as central methodologies. Recent projects focus on unsettling colonial narratives of landscape by bringing everyday gestures into environments marked by history and transformation. https://www.bikkaora.com/about
Julieanna Preston is an artist living in Ōtaki, Aotearoa who explores material vibrancy through durational place-situated performances, vocalisations, and experimental forms of writing. www.julieannapreston.space