2-22, 2-22, 2-22, 2-22

lua‘lualua, lua‘lualua, lua‘lualua, lua‘lualua

Numbers are symbols representing numerical value and are seen as being universally understood across languages.

This text, ‘2-22, 2-22, 2-22, 2-22’, recontextualises lines from an ornate TV2 design by Joseph Churchward, an uncle born in my family village Faleasi‘u, highlighting the Samoan and wider Oceanian gafa.

Numerology is the belief that there is a mystical relationship between numbers and events, and that the universe is a system constructed of numbers. 

Apparently in numerology, according to numerology.com, the number ‘2’ is ‘a supremely feminine force, one that represents both grace and power’.

Before the invention of paper, designs were housed on wood and skin. Wood carving is a subtractive sculpture skill where ‘negative’ space is made to create ‘positive’ space, or alternatively form and counterform.

‘2-22, 2-22, 2-22, 2-22’ centres a series of counterform shapes created by deconstructing a symbol from the dominant communication system. For the last couple of centuries, Europeans have insisted that language that is explicit and static is ‘civilised’ and that language that requires ongoing human activation is ‘uncivilised’. Where writing systems are broken apart, their meaning is no longer discernible to Western scholars. By deconstructing written language a different kind of knowledge is highlighted, one that speaks in geometries older than the Latin alphabet.

According to numerology.com, the number ‘22’ is known as the ‘Master Builder’ that ‘channels cosmic wisdom down to Earth and uses it to turn incredible dreams into reality’.

‘2-22, 2-22, 2-22, 2-22’ turns shapes that colonialism turned into products, back into storytelling forms. Indigenous Oceanians have always been expert wayfinders. Our advanced understanding of mathematics and aerodynamics, as well as being able to precisely interpret environmental data such as reading stars and ocean swells, over thousands of years formed who we are as peoples. Aerodynamics in particular, is fundamentally governed by how basic geometric forms interact with airflow.

The same lines our ancestors traced in physical environments, we now interpret digitally. Digital font editor applications use vector-based paths, employing Bézier curves that are defined by a set of control points that exert mathematical ‘pull’. Bézier curves were invented to enable computers to design aerodynamic car body panels.

Letters such as ‘s’ (and similar forms such as ‘2’) are hardest to interpret with digital drawing tools as it is difficult to achieve smooth curves and balanced proportions within a confined space. Rendering tight curves with multiple layers of counter forms creates much more room for error. The shapes that are a part of ‘2-22, 2-22, 2-22, 2-22’ were created by this method.

According to numerology.com, the number ‘222’ means that ‘your life is out of balance in some way’. Conversely, according to Cosmopolitan, ‘angel numbers, specifically 222, are numerical forms of language being sent to you from the other side’ and ‘associated with balance, collaboration, love, and harmony’.

Statistics are not just numbers, they are interpreted values with an 'objective' veneer that obscures political agendas, erroneous methodologies and deliberate manipulation.

Thousands of years ago, our ancestors journeyed from what is currently known as Taiwan. We became who we are—peoples defined by the Ocean—in Maluku. The hundreds of Moluccan islands are currently colonially occupied by Indonesia (GTFO of Oceanian Waters and Lands, colonisers). The place of our beginning now assists to sustain Indonesian colonial power through Nickel mining to the detriment of local Indigenous peoples. Next door in West Papua, the situation is even worse. Amongst the ongoing genocide and ecocide is the biggest gold mine in the world. Since Indonesia began colonising West Papua in 1963, at least 500,000 West Papuans have been murdered.

2…. 

times West Papua declared independence as a nation, in 1961 while under Dutch colonial occupation and in 2020 under Indonesian colonial occupation.

2… 

hundred and seventy is the estimated number of cultures and languages in West Papua.

2…. 

thousand and twenty-two was the year of Documenta 15, curated by a Javanese collective. Over 1,500 artists participated in the exhibition and not a single one was West Papuan. Where Indigenous peoples are oppressed by your people and you do not prioritise them, your arts practice is colonial, not ‘decolonial’.

I have had to reflect on this for myself. Samoans have not colonised Aboriginal peoples, but I have campaigned harder for Palestine since October, 2023 than for the Indigenous peoples whose continued suppression I have benefited from my entire life. We need to do better and ALWAYS prioritise First Peoples.

2….

Is definitely not a large enough number to encapsulate my many complaints to do with the way that the words ‘decolonial’ and ‘indigenous’ (they do not seem to know when the ‘I’ should be capitalised) are incompetently thrown around Europe, my anger at the many instances globally of Indigenous erasure and my frustrations at how around the world Indigenous Oceanian representation continues to be absent from even diversity-proclaiming art spaces. Lack of nuance, and centring diasporic narratives over and above Indigeneity, avoids addressing the root societal problems.

On the continent of stolen Lands known as ‘North America’, settlers often like to divide race into five categories—White, Asian, Hispanic, Black and Other. In addition to ongoing massive Land theft, cultural destruction and suppression, colonisation resulted in the murder of at least ten million Native peoples, with many millions more killed from South and Central America. Yet, in the nation state currently known as the United States of America, Native peoples often get placed into the ‘Other’ category in racial statistics on their own lands. Despite colonising Hawai‘i, Guåhan (Guåm), Sāmoa, Tåno' Låguas yan Gåni (the Mariana Islands) and more, not to mention the ocean itself through disproportionate climate change impacts, nuclear bombing, deep sea mining and ongoing military presence, Oceanians also tend to get placed in the ‘Other’ category.

‘AAPI’ and similar terms are forms of Indigenous erasure. I strongly contest this frankly odd ‘Asia-Pacific’ amalgamation of the Great Ocean—the largest geographic and most culturally diverse region on Earth—with Asia—also a huge expanse with diverse cultures and histories but are majoritarily non-Indigenous. Asia is also home to colonial powers, such as the colonisation of Tibet by China, resulting in the deaths of over a million Tibetans, and Indonesian colonisation of my fellow Oceanians in West Papua, Maluku and Timor.

Numerology in its current Western form is credited to ancient Greeks, but is also said to trace further back to Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, and Indian civilisations. The practices of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Ocean pre-date the invention of numerology and these credited ‘ancient’ civilisations. 

‘2-22, 2-22, 2-22, 2-22‘, part of ‘Ancient Geometries’ that examines ancient/timeless sensibilities in designs by Joseph Churchward, is under an overarching research project, ‘Indigenous Autonomy and Latin Characters’. I first presented my research at a conference panel ‘Storyweaving with Oceanic Sisters‘ convened by Dorell Ben and Eva Cruz, with Randizia Crisotomo, Teulia Hughes and myself. During the panel, Crisotomo’s reference to ‘ancestral muscle memory’ particularly stuck with me.

An immediate association of movements inherited across many generations is siva Sāmoa. The motions of dance not only reference the surrounding environments of our ancestors, but replicate actions carried out in the past such as travel by ship, armed conflict and daily life. As a siva is performed, the individual disappears in place of an entire lineage—the many who carried out the same motions. Regardless of culture, the repetition of another person’s movement from the past brings their embodied knowledge into the present. In repeating the typographic movements of Joseph Churchward, I am able to absorb his knowledge through body as much as through mind. Similar to siva, he too recorded his environment through articulated gestures. By following these motions, I incorporate his histories and surroundings, those of our shared ancestors, as well as adding my own.

Peoples of the Great Ocean are wayfinders of over a third of the world’s surface. Joseph Churchward learnt how to construct Latin letters by drawing them in the sand in Sāmoa. The details in typography reveal bigger pictures than written words are able to capture.