As a team formed in August of 2022, we met tirelessly, weaving together our diverse interests and backgrounds to create something tending to the PQ23 curatorial theme of RARE: art springing out of ideas, materials, artistic approaches, and design practices that connect to the human level from within an environment, with its genius loci and showing its unique character. We found ourselves circling back to water, to wai as a geopolitical archive and a container of stories and to our water-locked position within Te Moana Nui a Kiwi (Pacific Ocean).

Wai Kōrero is a conversation, bridging bodies of wai (water) from Aotearoa & the Vltava River, Prague. Wai is a living tapestry, library, and archive — delicately threaded and woven from infinite possibilities and becoming/s across space and time. We hold rivers, oceans and tsunamis within us, palimpsests of bodies upon bodies, patterns of macrocosms folding into microcosms. Nothing added or lost for billions of years. The same watery molecules fluxing, flowing, comprising bodies, and bathing them to being.

As a group, we travelled across Aotearoa, gathering sound collections from sources of wai, where we felt a strong connection — where the river meets the ocean, swamplands, lakes and underground streams and where nothing is the same for two seconds together. These sounds pulsate through a series of tubes, echoing, tunnelling to a pool of water from the Vltava River. Vibrating above, about, below, their dialogue transforms and the invisible becomes visible — rippling, swirling conversations. Portals run amongst these tubes, allowing you to stand within, and listen to their stories; to hear in a language not always heard.